Histomorphological analysis of perfusion parameters and CNS lymphatic vessels in mice: an experimental method study.

To investigate the distribution and characteristics of lymphatic vessels within the central nervous system, we focus on the meninges of the spinal cord and brain parenchyma in mice. Additionally, we aim to provide experimental methods for obtaining optimal imaging and clear structures of lymphatic vessels, while optimizing the perfusion parameters to improve histomorphological quality. Male C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into four groups, with each group assigned a specific perfusion parameter based on perfusion volumes and temperatures. Immunofluorescence staining of lymphatics and blood vessels was performed on both meningeal and the brain tissue samples. Statistical analysis was performed using one-way analysis of variance to compare the groups, and a significant level of P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Our study reports the presence of lymphatic vessels in the meninges of the spinal cord and brain parenchyma in mice. We highlight the crucial role of high perfusion volume of paraformaldehyde with low temperature in fixation for achieving optimal results. We provide experimental methods for obtaining optimal imaging and clear structures of lymphatic vessels in the meninges of the spinal cord and brain parenchyma in mice, which contribute to our understanding of the distribution and characteristics of lymphatic vessels within the central nervous system. Further research is warranted to explore the functional implications of these lymphatic vessels and their potential therapeutic significance in neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases.

Low polarization-sensitive ultra-broadband anti-reflection coatings with improved reliability.

Broader spectra, lower reflectivity and higher reliability are the performance requirements for broadband antireflective (BBAR) films. In this work, a BBAR film structure was proposed, which maintains extremely low reflectivity, ultra-wide spectra, low polarization sensitivity and practical reliability. The BBAR film consists of a dense multilayer interference stack on the bottom and a nano-grass-like alumina (NGLA) layer with a gradient low refractive index distribution on the top. The film was deposited by atomic layer deposition, while the NGLA layer was formed by means of a hot water bath on Al2O3 layer. The top NGLA layer has extremely high porosity and ultra-low refractive index, along with extremely fragile structure. To surmount the fragility of NGLA layer, a sub-nano layer of SiO2 was grown by atomic layer deposition to solidify its structure and also to adjust the refractive index with different thicknesses of SiO2. Finally, in the wide wavelength range of 400-1100 nm, the average transmittance of the double-sided coated fused quartz reaches 99.2%. The absorption, light scattering, reliability and polarization characteristics of BBAR films were investigated. An optimized BBAR film with low polarization-sensitivity and improved reliability was realized, which should be potentially promising for application in optical systems.

Design and Fabrication of an Ag Ultrathin Layer-Based Transparent Band Tunable Conductor and Its Thermal Stability.

Transparent conductors (TC) have been widely applied in a wide range of optoelectronic devices. Nevertheless, different transparent spectral bands are always needed for particular applications. In this work, indium tin oxide (ITO)-free TCs with tunable transparent bands based on the film structure of TiO2/Ag/AZO (Al-doped ZnO) were designed by the transfer matrix method and deposited by magnetron sputtering. The transparent spectra and figure-of-merit (FOM) were effectively adjusted by precisely controlling the Ag layer's thickness. The fabricated as-deposited samples exhibited an average optical transmittance larger than 88.3% (400-700 nm), a sheet resistance lower than 7.7 Ω.sq-1, a low surface roughness of about 1.4 nm, and mechanical stability upon 1000 bending cycles. Moreover, the samples were able to hold optical and electrical properties after annealing at 300 °C for 60 min, but failed at 400 °C even for 30 min.

Optimization of optical and structural properties of Al2O3/TiO2 nano-laminates deposited by atomic layer deposition for optical coating.

Optimizing the atomic layer deposition (ALD) process of films is particularly important in preparing multilayer interference films. In this work, a series of Al2O3/TiO2 nano-laminates with a fixed growth cycle ratio of 1:10 were deposited on Si and fused quartz substrates at 300 °C by ALD. The optical properties, crystallization behavior, surface appearance and microstructures of those laminated layers were systematically investigated by spectroscopic ellipsometry, spectrophotometry, X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscope and transmission electron microscopy. By inserting Al2O3 interlayers into TiO2 layers, the crystallization of the TiO2 is reduced and the surface roughness becomes smaller. The TEM images show that excessively dense distribution of Al2O3 intercalation leads to the appearance of TiO2 nodules, which in turn leads to increased roughness. The Al2O3/TiO2 nano-laminate with a cycle ratio 40:400 has relatively small surface roughness. Additionally, oxygen-deficient defects exist at the interface of Al2O3 and TiO2, leading to evident absorption. Using O3 as an oxidant instead of H2O for depositing Al2O3 interlayers was verified to be effective in reducing absorption during broadband antireflective coating experiments.

Ultrasonic-assisted stewing enhances the aroma intensity of chicken broth: A perspective of the aroma-binding behavior of fat.

This experiment investigated the underlying mechanism of ultrasonic-assisted stewing to enhance the aroma intensity of chicken broth by measuring fat content, oil droplet sizes, zeta potential, viscosity, surface protein loading, lipid oxidation, and aroma compound concentrations. As the thermo-ultrasound time increased, the fat content increased from 0.3 % to 1.2 %, resulting in a milky white appearance. After 1 h of thermo-ultrasound, the broth had the smallest particle size and the highest surface protein load, viscosity, and emulsion stability, as well as the highest total amount of aroma-active compounds of 314.70 ng/mg. With the further extension of thermo-ultrasound time, lipid oxidation increased, but the stability of chicken broth decreased, lowering the content of aroma-active compounds. These outcomes suggested that thermo-ultrasound could enhance the aroma intensity of chicken broth by increasing the fat content and the emulsion stability of the broth.

Double-sided optical coating of strongly curved glass by atomic layer deposition.

A reaction chamber of atomic layer deposition (ALD) was developed for simultaneous coating on the inner and outer surfaces of a large-size and strongly curved glass bowl. The inner surface ALD process was in a showerhead reaction mode and the outer surface ALD process was in a cross-flow reaction mode. Blue reflection (BR) film of 400 nm wavelength and broadband antireflection (BBAR) film of 400-700 nm wavelength were coated on different glass bowls by ALD. The spectral uniformity of both coated bowls was studied. The measured spectra at multiple positions of the glass bowl with the BBAR coating show better spectral uniformity along the circumference than the depth. The spectral deviation is mainly caused by the non-uniformity of the film on the outer surface (<±3%), and the film on the inner surface has good uniformity along both the circumference and the depth (<±0.7%). The growth rate of the outer film was reduced by 10% on average compared to that of the inner film due to the different gas flow mode.

Effective method to study the thickness-dependent dielectric functions of nanometal thin film.

A new method for measuring the dielectric functions change with the thickness of nanometal thin films was proposed. To confirm the accuracy and reliability of the method, a nano-thin wedge-shaped gold (Au) film with continuously varied thicknesses was designed and prepared on K9 glass by direct-current-sputtering (DC-sputtering). The thicknesses and the dielectric functions in the wavelength range of 300-1100 nm of the nano-thin Au films were obtained by fitting the ellipsometric parameters with the Drude and critical points model. Results show that while the real part of the dielectric function (ϵ1) changes marginally with increasing film thickness, the imaginary part (ϵ2) decreases drastically with the film thickness, approaching a stable value when the film thickness increases up to about 42 nm. This method is particularly useful in the study of thickness-dependent optical properties of nano-thin film.

An optical monitoring method for depositing dielectric layers of arbitrary thickness using reciprocal of transmittance.

An approach extracting information of both optical monitoring signal and phase thickness of deposited layer on a trace diagram is proposed. Realtime fitting and calculation are performed to get both practical thickness and refractive index of deposited layer with the assist of quartz crystal monitoring for keeping steady rate of deposition. Monitoring error of thickness using this approach is analyzed. It was used to obtain the refractive indices and thickness of Ge layer and SiO layer in in situ measurement mode, and the results were compared with those of ex-situ spectral measurement using infrared spectrometer. The effectiveness of the proposed monitoring method was verified by fabricating narrow bandpass filter consisting of quarter-wave and non-quarter-wave layers.

Design of non-polarizing cut-off filters based on dielectric-metal-dielectric stacks.

Cut-off filters are usually operating at oblique incidence and exhibit polarization dependence properties. We propose a simple approach to design cut-off filters with low linear polarization sensitivity (LPS) based on dielectric-metal-dielectric (DMD) stacks. The designing method is derived from the theory of optical film characteristic matrix. The admittance loci of the film are adjusted to achieve similar spectral properties of s- and p-polarized light at oblique incidence. Different film structures are designed non-polarizing at different angles of incidence with the method. The results show that the designing method is efficient for designing non-polarizing cut-off filters, which are widely used in non-polarizing optical system.

Application of image spectrometer to in situ infrared broadband optical monitoring for thin film deposition.

A path-folded infrared image spectrometer with five sub-gratings and five linear-array detectors was applied to a broadband optical monitoring (BOM) system for thin film deposition. Through in situ BOM, we can simultaneously acquire the thickness and refractive index of each layer in real time by fitting the measured spectra, and modify the deposition parameters during deposition process according to the fitting results. An effective data processing method was proposed and applied in the BOM process, and it shortened the data processing time and improved the monitoring efficiency greatly. For demonstration, a narrow band-pass filter (NBF) at 1540 nm with ~10 nm full width at half-maximum (FWHM) had been manufactured using the developed BOM system, and the results showed that this BOM method was satisfying for monitoring deposition of thin film devices.

Path-folded infrared spectrometer consisting of 10 sub-gratings and a two-dimensional InGaAs detector.

A new compact infrared spectrometer without any mechanical moving elements has been designed and constructed using a two-dimensional InGaAs array detector and 10 sub-gratings. The instrument is compact, with a double-folded optical path configuration. The spectra are densely 10-folded to achieve 0.07-nm spectral resolution and a 2-ms data acquisition time in the 1450- to 1650-nm wavelength region, making the instrument useful for real-time spectroscopic data analyses in optical communication and many other fields.

Study of the new ellipsometric measurement method using integrated analyzer in parallel mode.

A new type of ellipsometer using an integrated analyzer composed of 12 sub-analyzers with different azimuth angles was constructed and studied. By using a two-dimensional CCD array camera to measure the light intensity emerging in parallel from each sub-analyzer with the azimuth angles uniformly distributed in the range of about 180 degrees , the ellipsometric parameters were extracted within the data acquisition time less than 1 second. The ellipsometric parameters for the polished bulk Si sample were measured to show good agreement with the results measured by using another two ellipsometric methods. The new method having the merits of high speed and reliability in the optical data measurement can be potentially used in the fields where the in situ data acquisition with high precision is the key issue as required.

Simple and efficient method for specularity removal in an image.

For dielectric inhomogeneous objects, the perceived reflections are the linear combinations of diffuse and specular reflection components. Specular reflection plays an important role in the fields of image analysis, pattern recognition, and scene synthesis. Several methods for the separation of the diffuse and the specular reflection components have been presented based on image segmentation or local interaction of neighboring pixels. We propose a simple and effective method for specularity removal in a single image on the level of each individual pixel. The chromaticity of diffuse reflection is approximately estimated by employing the concept of modified specular-free image, and the specular component is adjusted according to the criterion of smooth color transition along the boundary of diffuse and specular regions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is promising when compared with other state-of-the-art techniques, in both separation accuracy and running speed.

[Effect of roots of Ficus hirta on cocaine-induced hepatotoxicity and active components].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the protective effect of the roots of F. hirta against the cocaine-induced hepatotoxicity and it's active components. METHOD: Cocaine hydrochloride was subcutaneously injected to make male ICR mice liver wounded. Male ICR mice were randomly ig administered with the F. hirta decoction. The dose groups are 100, 200, 300 g x kg(-1) herb materials per body weight. Cocaine hydrochloride was subcutaneously injected into the mice after the administration. The serum ALT, AST activity and the activity of CAT in liver homogenate were assayed, and liver change of pathomorphism was evaluated to prove the effect of the F. hirta decoction on cocaine-induced hepatotoxicity. And the activity of psoralean which was separated from the F. hirta decoction by bioassay-guided fractionation, was proofed in the same method. RESULT: We find that the F. hirta decoction shows a distinct effect on reducing serum transferase. The serum transferase and the content CAT in liver homogenate were dose-related reduced, and the histopathological examination found a significantly change of the liver tissues. And the psoralean, qua the mainly component, shows the same effect. CONCLUSION: F. hirta has the protective effect against the cocaine-induced hepatotoxicity. Psoralean is the basis.