Combination therapy of methotrexate and iguratimod for female patients with moderate to severe active rheumatoid arthritis and its impact on ovarian function.

Rheumatoid arthritis is systemic inflammatory disease, presenting as symmetrical polyarthritis, mainly affecting hands and feet. Female patients with rheumatoid arthritis have also decreased fertility and premature ovarian failure. Methotrexate is used in treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. However, single treatment of Methotrexate is not ideal and often needs to be combined with other drugs like Iguratimod for intensive treatment of refractory rheumatoid arthritis. We aim to explore efficacy of combined use of MTX and IGU for female patients with rheumatoid arthritis and its impact on ovarian reserve function. Total 80 female patients with moderate to severe active rheumatoid arthritis were selected and randomly divided into MTX and MTX + IGU groups. The MTX + IGU group showed lower levels of IL-1ß, IL-6, IL-17 and TNF-α after treatment as compared to MTX group. The MTX + IGU group showed significantly higher level of AMH at the end of treatment. However, no statistical differences were observed in FSH, LH, E2 and AFC levels between the two groups. The combined therapy of MTX and IGU has better efficacy with less impact on ovarian function, even improving ovarian reserve function through effective control of rheumatoid inflammatory activity.

Effect of Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang on MMP-2 and MMP-9 and invasion of human hepatoma HepG2 cells / 中国免疫学杂志

Objective:To investigate the effect and mechanism of Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang on the expression of MMP-2,MMP-9 and invasion of human hepatoma HepG2 cell.Methods:Hepatioma HepG2 cell was treated with Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang.The cell viability was measured by CCK8.The invasion of HepG2 was detected by Transwell assay.The expression of MMP-2 and MMP-9 was analyzed by ELISA.Results:In the CCK8 assay,Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang could inhibit the proliferation of HepG2 cells at a density and time measure.In the Transwell assay,the inhibitory rate of invasion was 52.45% when treated with Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang at a concentration of 2.65 mg/ml. The ELISA assay indicated that the expression of MMP-2 and MMP-9 decreased significantly after treated with Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang(P<0.05). Conclusion:Fuzheng Jiedu Tongluofang suppressed the invasion of HepG2 with the possible mechanism of down-regulating the expression of MMP-2 and MMP-9 in HepG2.

Numerical Investigation on Aerodynamic and Combustion Performance of Chevron Mixer Inside an Afterburner.

To improve the performance of the afterburner for the turbofan engine, an innovative type of mixer, namely, the chevron mixer, was considered to enhance the mixture between the core flow and the bypass flow. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations investigated the aerodynamic performances and combustion characteristics of the chevron mixer inside a typical afterburner. Three types of mixer, namely, CC (chevrons tilted into core flow), CB (chevrons tilted into bypass flow), and CA (chevrons tilted into core flow and bypass flow alternately), respectively, were studied on the aerodynamic performances of mixing process. The chevrons arrangement has significant effect on the mixing characteristics and the CA mode seems to be advantageous for the generation of the stronger streamwise vortices with lower aerodynamic loss. Further investigations on combustion characteristics for CA mode were performed. Calculation results reveal that the local temperature distribution at the leading edge section of flame holder is improved under the action of streamwise vortices shedding from chevron mixers. Consequently, the combustion efficiency increased by 3.5% compared with confluent mixer under the same fuel supply scheme.

Human cerebral image registration using generalized mutual information / 生物医学工程学杂志

Medical image registration is a highlight of actual research on medical image processing. Based onsimilarity measure of Shannon entropy, a new generalized distance measurement based on Rényi entropy applied to image rigid registration is introduced and is called here generalized mutual information (GMI). It is used in three dimensional cerebral image registration experiments. The simulation results show that generalized distance measurement and Shannon entropy measurement apply to different areas; that the registration measure based o n generalized distance is a natural extension of mutual information of Shannon entropy. The results prove that generalized mutual information uses less time than simple mutual information does, and the new similarity measure manifests higher degree of consistency between the two cerebral registration images. Also, the registration results provide the clinical diagnoses with more important references. In conclusion, generalized mutual information has satisfied the demands of clinical application to a wide extent.

The application of adaptive algorithm and wavelet transform in the filtering of ECG signal / 生物医学工程学杂志

Electrocardiographic (ECG) signal are a kind of basic physiological signals of human body, and are very important in clinical diagnosis. But the ECG signals from body surface are often interfered by noises such as 50 Hz noise, baseline displacemant, electromyography (EMG) noise and edv. These noises bring obstacle to the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. To eliminate the ECG signals noises mentioned above,this paper adopts LMS adaptive algorithm and wavelet transform theory to design three kinds of digital adaptive filters-adaptive noise cancellation filter, wavelet transform filter and adaptive signal dividing filter to filter the corresponding noises. The results show that the three kinds of noises existing in the ECG signal have been efficiently eliminated.