Occluded Facial Pain Assessment in the ICU using Action Units Guided Network.

Untreated pain in critically ill patients can lead to immunosuppression and increased metabolic activity, with severe clinical consequences such as tachypnea and delirium. Continuous pain assessment is challenging due to nursing shortages and intensive care unit (ICU) workload. Mechanical ventilation equipment obscures the facial features of many patients in the ICU, making previous facial pain detection methods based on full-face images inapplicable. This paper proposes a facial Action Units (AUs) guided pain assessment network for faces under occlusion. The network consists of an AU-guided (AUG) module, a texture feature extraction (TFE) module, and a pain assessment (PA) module. The AUG module automatically detects AUs in the non-occluded areas of the face. In contrast, the TFE module detects the facial landmarks and crops prior knowledge patches, a random exploration patch, and a global feature patch. Then these patches are fed into two convolutional networks to extract texture features. Afterward, the designed AU guidances and texture features are fused in the PA module to assess the pain state. Extensive validation is conducted on a public dataset and two datasets created in this work. The proposed network architecture achieves superior performance in binary classification, four-class classification, and intensity regression tasks. In addition, we have successfully applied the network to actual data collected in the laboratory environment with excellent results.

Cell line derived from muscle of Gymnocypris przewalskii, a species of Schizothoracinae in Qinghai Lake, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Gymnocypris przewalskii (naked carp), a native teleost, plays an important role in the ecosystem of Qinghai Lake (altitude, 3.2 km) on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. We developed a new cell line from the muscle of G. przewalskii using the explant technique and named the cell line GPM. This cell line was maintained in DMEM medium (high glucose) supplemented with 15% fetal bovine serum (FBS). The cell line was successfully subcultured up to 32 passages and was authenticated by immunofluorescence assay, sequencing the mitochondrial cytochrome C oxidase subunit I (COI) and 16S rRNA genes, and by chromosome analysis. In the medium containing 15% FBS, the cell line could be passaged stably at 25 °C. The GPM cell line could express green fluorescent protein (GFP) with a CMV promoter with about 5% transfection efficiency. MTT tests showed that Clostridium botulinum toxin (BTX) was toxic to the cell line. The cell line could be successfully cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen with a revival efficiency of over 70%. This study demonstrated that the GPM cell line can be used as an important tool for understanding the physiological characteristics of G. przewalskii, and it can provide a resource for studying gene function and toxicological reactions in vitro.