Increased risk of colorectal adenomas with metabolic-associated fatty liver disease components.

BACKGROUND: Metabolic (dysfunction)-associated fatty liver disease is the most common liver disease related to various metabolic disorders. Colorectal adenomas are related to metabolic dysregulation. Despite the proposed association between non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and colorectal adenomas, the influence of metabolic-associated fatty liver disease on colorectal adenomas has yet to be investigated. Our study investigates the relationship between metabolic-associated fatty liver disease and colorectal adenomas and evaluates the predictive value of fatty liver index for colorectal adenomas. METHODS: A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted on 650 inpatients at Qinghai Provincial People's Hospital. All participants underwent colonoscopy, abdominal ultrasound or CT, relevant laboratory tests, and physical examinations to ascertain baseline characteristics and overall health status. Multivariate logistic regression analysis examined the relationship between metabolic-associated fatty liver disease and colorectal adenomas. Lastly, the ability to identify, accuracy, and clinical applicability of predicting colorectal adenomas through fatty liver index were assessed using receiver operating characteristic curve area under the curve, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis. RESULT: In both the colorectal adenomas and control groups, the prevalence of metabolic-associated fatty liver disease was 62.1 % and 35.7 %, respectively. Multivariate analysis indicates that metabolic-associated fatty liver disease was independently correlated with an increased risk of colorectal adenomas (OR, 1.565; 95 % CI, 1.057-2.319; P < 0.05). Further analysis revealed that the risk of colorectal adenomas increased with an increasing quantity of metabolic components in metabolic-associated fatty liver disease (Ptrend < 0.001). The area under the curve of the fatty liver index predictive model was 0.838, with a 95 % CI of 0.807-0.869. The calibration curve indicated excellent agreement, and the decision curve analysis revealed a higher net benefit. CONCLUSION: The risk of colorectal adenomas was associated with metabolic-associated fatty liver disease, and the risk of developing colorectal adenomas increased with the presence of more metabolic-associated fatty liver disease metabolic components. Furthermore, fatty liver index served as a predictive indicator for screening colorectal adenomas.

Twist-Net: A multi-modality transfer learning network with the hybrid bilateral encoder for hypopharyngeal cancer segmentation.

Hypopharyngeal cancer (HPC) is a rare disease. Therefore, it is a challenge to automatically segment HPC tumors and metastatic lymph nodes (HPC risk areas) from medical images with the small-scale dataset. Combining low-level details and high-level semantics from feature maps in different scales can improve the accuracy of segmentation. Herein, we propose a Multi-Modality Transfer Learning Network with Hybrid Bilateral Encoder (Twist-Net) for Hypopharyngeal Cancer Segmentation. Specifically, we propose a Bilateral Transition (BT) block and a Bilateral Gather (BG) block to twist (fuse) high-level semantic feature maps and low-level detailed feature maps. We design a block with multi-receptive field extraction capabilities, M Block, to capture multi-scale information. To avoid overfitting caused by the small scale of the dataset, we propose a transfer learning method that can transfer priors experience from large computer vision datasets to multi-modality medical imaging datasets. Compared with other methods, our method outperforms other methods on HPC dataset, achieving the highest Dice of 82.98%. Our method is also superior to other methods on two public medical segmentation datasets, i.e., the CHASE_DB1 dataset and BraTS2018 dataset. On these two datasets, the Dice of our method is 79.83% and 84.87%, respectively. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhongqiu1245/TwistNet.

Transcriptome and metabolite profiling to identify genes associated with rhizome lignification and the function of ZoCSE in ginger (Zingiber officinale).

Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) is an important spice crop in China, and fresh ginger rhizomes are consumed as vegetable in Sichuan and Chongqing. However, tissue lignification accelerates with rhizome maturation, resulting in the loss of edible quality. To understand the molecular mechanisms of texture modification during rhizome development, we investigated lignin accumulation patterns and identified the key genes associated with lignin biosynthesis using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq). Results showed that the contents of total lignin and its precursors exhibited notable declines with tissue maturation. However, the lignin composition was remarkably modified and syringyl lignin was deposited in mature rhizomes, leading to ginger lignification. Transcriptome analysis displayed 32 lignin biosynthetic genes were dramatically downregulated with rhizome development, including caffeoylshikimate esterase (CSE ), 4-coumarate-CoA ligase , laccase , cinnamoyl-CoA reductase , cinnamyl-alcohol dehydrogenase , peroxidase and caffeic acid 3-O-methyltransferase , indicating that lignin reduction might be attributed to deficiency in intermediates or the downregulation of key biosynthetic enzymes. Furthermore, overexpressing ZoCSE in Nicotiana benthamiana L. enhanced the total lignin content, suggesting its fundamental role in lignin biosynthesis. RNA-Seq also identified candidate lignin production regulators, including hormone-related genes and NAC/MYB transcription factors (ZoNAC1 , ZoNAC4 , ZoMYB14 and ZoMYB17 ). This result provides a molecular basis for lignin accumulation in ginger.

A R2R3-MYB transcriptional activator LmMYB15 regulates chlorogenic acid biosynthesis and phenylpropanoid metabolism in Lonicera macranthoides.

Lonicera macranthoides Hand-Mazz is an important medicinal plant widely distributed in southern China that has long been used in Chinese traditional medicines. Chlorogenic acid (CGA, 3-caffeoylquinic acid) is the major biologically active ingredient in L. macranthoides. Although key CGA biosynthetic genes have been well documented, their transcriptional regulation remains largely unknown. In this study, we observed that a R2R3 MYB transcription factor LmMYB15 showed a significant correlation with CGA content, indicating its potential role in CGA biosynthesis. A yeast two-hybrid assay suggested that LmMYB15 functions as a transcriptional activator. Overexpression of LmMYB15 in tobacco led to increased accumulation of CGA compared to those in wild-type leaves. To elucidate its functional mechanism, genome-wide DAP-seq was employed and identified the conserved binding motifs of LmMYB15, that is [(C/T) (C/T) (C/T) ACCTA(C/A) (C/T) (A/T)], as well as its direct downstream target genes, including 4CL, MYB3, MYB4, KNAT6/7, IAA26, and ETR2. Subsequently, yeast one-hybrid and dual-luciferase reporter assays verified that LmMYB15 could bind and activate the promoters of 4CL, MYB3 and MYB4, thereby facilitating CGA biosynthesis and phenylpropanoid metabolism. Our findings provide a new track for breeding strategies aiming to enhance CGA content in L. macranthoides that can significantly contribute to better mechanical properties.

Mitigation of crosstalk between RSB and LSB signals generated by one I/Q modulator.

Optical independent sideband (ISB) signals can be generated by exploiting one external In-phase/Quadrature (I/Q) modulator. Our theoretical analysis shows crosstalk between the two ISB (right and left side) signals can attribute to two main imperfections: amplitude difference and phase unmatched in I/Q data. To reduce the impact of crosstalk between the two ISB signals, we propose three schemes. The first is precise phase match of the I and Q data. The second has been made possible by setting different frequencies for the left sideband (LSB) and the right sideband (RSB) signals, and the last is achieved by adding Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) equalization digital signal processing (DSP) at the receiver side. Our experimental results have shown that these schemes can improve the performance of ISB signals. In our experimental system we designed dual ISB system with different modulation formats in two sidebands. Precise phase match can bring a ∼2.2dB improvement at BER of 1×10-2 and a ∼4.3dB improvement at BER of 1×10-3 for 16-ary quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16QAM) and quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) signals, respectively, in 4Gbaud with carrier frequency of 36GHz system. The BER of 4Gbaud 16QAM ISB signal at 30GHz and 4Gbaud QPSK ISB signal at 38GHz can reach hard-decision forward-error-correction (HD-FEC) when the input power is larger than -5.5 and -7.4dBm respectively in different frequencies system. For 4Gbaud with carrier frequency of 36GHz system, the BER of 16QAM signal and QPSK signal reduce ∼2.1 and ∼2.2dB at HD-FEC after using MIMO. In addition, MIMO can further improve the performance of the matched phase system or the system with different frequencies.

Independent dual single-sideband vector millimeter-wave signal generation by one single I/Q modulator.

We propose a new scheme to realize the independent dual single-sideband (SSB) vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal generation based on one single in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator. The two SSB vector mm-wave signals can have independent carrier frequencies and modulation formats. We experimentally demonstrate the simultaneous generation and transmission of 38 GHz 16-ary quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16QAM) and 40 GHz quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) mm-wave signals based on this scheme. The penalty of the 16QAM and QPSK mm-wave signals after transmission over 10-km standard single-mode fiber and 0.5-m wireless link can be neglected.

Photonic vector mm-wave signal generation by optical dual-SSB modulation and a single push-pull MZM.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate single-sideband (SSB) photonic vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal generation enabled by optical dual-SSB modulation and a single push-pull Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM). We use software-based digital signal processing to generate the dual-SSB driving signal for the push-pull MZM. The dual-SSB driving signal has a vector-modulated sideband and an unmodulated sideband, which are spaced by our desired mm-wave carrier frequency. After linear modulation of the push-pull MZM, optical filtering, and single-ended photodiode detection, we can get an electrical mm-wave signal displaying the same vector modulation as the aforementioned vector-modulated sideband. Based on our proposed scheme, we experimentally demonstrate the generation and transmission of a 40 GHz mm-wave signal carrying 1 Gbaud 16-ary quadrature-amplitude-modulation or 4 Gbaud quadrature-phase-shift-keying transmitter data over a 10 km single-mode fiber-28 and 0.5 m air-space link, with a bit-error-ratio less than the hard-decision forward-error-correction threshold.