Clinical efficiency of three-port inflatable robot-assisted thoracoscopic surgery in mediastinal tumor resection.

BACKGROUND: Aimed to assess clinical effect of three-port inflatable robot-assisted thoracoscopic surgery in mediastinal tumor resection by comparing results of the robot group with the video group. METHODS: Retrospectively analyze 179 patients diagnosed with anterior mediastinal tumor from May 2017 to August 2021. Two groups were divided according to the surgical approach, including 92 cases in the RATS group and 87 cases in the VATS group. The results were analyzed between two groups with variables of age, sex, BMI, tumor size, and diagnosis. Perioperative clinical data was gathered to compare. RESULT: There were no significant differences between the 2 groups with regards to demographic data and clinical features. There were no significant differences inoperative time and duration of chest tube via RATS vs. VATS. The intraoperative blood loss was statistically significantly different among the RATS and VATS groups (75.9 ± 39.6 vs. 97.4 ± 35.8 ml p = 0.042). The postoperative stay of patients in RATS group were significantly shorter than that in VATS group (2.3 ± 1.0 vs. 3.4 ± 1.4 day p = 0.035), CONCLUSION: Three-port inflatable robot-assisted thoracoscopic surgery for mediastinal tumor is feasible and reliable it is more advantageous, and it provides the surgeon with advice on treatment choice.

Corticotropin-releasing hormone neurons control trigeminal neuralgia-induced anxiodepression via a hippocampus-to-prefrontal circuit.

Anxiety and depression are frequently observed in patients suffering from trigeminal neuralgia (TN), but neural circuits and mechanisms underlying this association are poorly understood. Here, we identified a dedicated neural circuit from the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that mediates TN-related anxiodepression. We found that TN caused an increase in excitatory synaptic transmission from vHPCCaMK2A neurons to mPFC inhibitory neurons marked by the expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). Activation of CRH+ neurons subsequently led to feed-forward inhibition of layer V pyramidal neurons in the mPFC via activation of the CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1). Inhibition of the vHPCCaMK2A-mPFCCRH circuit ameliorated TN-induced anxiodepression, whereas activating this pathway sufficiently produced anxiodepressive-like behaviors. Thus, our studies identified a neural pathway driving pain-related anxiodepression and a molecular target for treating pain-related psychiatric disorders.

Fine alignment, flexible fusion: A novel framework of multi-model score fusion in face identification.

Multi-model score fusion was considered a bottleneck problem in forensic face identification. While the score distribution of different face models varies greatly, the existing score processing methods cannot achieve accurate alignment. This paper proposed a score fusion framework named fine alignment and flexible fusion framework (FAFF). In FAFF, we took score-based likelihood ratios as the reference values to align the similarity scores generated by different face models. First, we set up a unified calibration test workflow based on the forensic likelihood ratio test. Then, 3 LLR anchor-based methods (LLRBA1, LLRBA2, and LLRBA3) and LLR curve-based methods (LLRBC) were proposed. Finally, we conducted fusion experiments on four face models (VGGface, Facenet, Arcface, and SFace). The experimental results show that on the CelebA dataset, compared with the existing MOEBA and PAN methods, LLRBC increased the TPR@ 10-7 FPR by 175.4 % and 162.9 %, and LLRBA increased by 55.6 % and 48.5 %.

Spatiotemporally controlled Pseudomonas exotoxin transgene system combined with multifunctional nanoparticles for breast cancer antimetastatic therapy.

The tumor microenvironment is a barrier to breast cancer therapy. Cancer-associated fibroblast cells (CAFs) can support tumor proliferation, metastasis, and drug resistance by secreting various cytokines and growth factors. Abnormal angiogenesis provides sufficient nutrients for tumor proliferation. Considering that CAFs express the sigma receptor (which recognizes anisamide, AA), we developed a CAFs and breast cancer cells dual-targeting nano drug delivery system to transport the LightOn gene express system, a spatiotemporal controlled gene expression consisting of a light-sensitive transcription factor and a specific minimal promoter. We adopted RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) to selectively bind to the αvß3 integrin on activated vascular endothelial cells and tumor cells. After the LightOn system has reached the tumor site, LightOn gene express system can spatiotemporal controllably express toxic Pseudomonas exotoxin An under blue light irradiation. The LightOn gene express system, combined with multifunctional nanoparticles, achieved high targeting delivery efficiency both in vitro and in vivo. It also displayed strong tumor and CAFs inhibition, anti-angiogenesis ability and anti-metastasis ability, with good safety. Moreover, it improved survival rate, survival time, and lung metastasis rate in a mouse breast cancer model. This study proves the efficacy of combining the LightOn system with targeted multifunctional nanoparticles in tumor and anti-metastatic therapy and provides new insights into tumor microenvironment regulation.

HSF4 Transcriptionally Activates Autophagy by Regulating ATG9a During Lens Terminal Differentiation.

Purpose: HSF4 mutations are responsible for congenital cataract formation. Dysfunction of HSF4 leads to defects in lens terminal differentiation. We aimed to study the mechanism of how HSF4 promotes organelle degradation during lens differentiation. Methods: HSF4del42 mutant mice that developed congenital cataracts were employed. The organelle degradation and autophagic function in lens fibers were detected by immunofluorescence and Immunoblotting. Transcriptome analysis was performed to investigate the differentially expressed genes in HSF4del42 lenses, whereas luciferase report assay and ChIP assay were used to confirm the directly transcriptional regulation of ATG9a by HSF4. Results: HSF4del42 mice displayed delayed organelle clearance and impaired autophagic degradation function in lens fibers. Activation of autophagy by rapamycin ameliorated the defects in organelle clearance in HSF4del42 lenses ex vivo and in vivo. Depletion of HSF4 attenuated autophagic flux by disrupting autophagosome biogenesis and maturation in lens epithelial cells. HSF4 directly transcriptionally activated the core autophagy protein ATG9a. Instead of the canonical ATG9a isoform, the ATG9a-X2 isoform was predominantly expressed in the lens and alleviated autophagic defects in HSF4 KO lens epithelial cells. The ATG9a-X2 protein displayed a short half-life, and rapamycin treatment restored its levels in HSF4 KO lens epithelial cells and HSF4del42 lenses. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that HSF4 facilitates organelle degradation probably by transcriptionally activating autophagy during lens terminal differentiation. We first report the involvement of HSF4 in autophagy and the tissue specific splicing of ATG9a. Our study indicates that autophagy activation is a possible therapeutic strategy for HSF4-related congenital cataracts.

Effectiveness of Baduanjin (a Type of Qigong) on Physical, Cognitive, and Mental Health Outcomes: A Comprehensive Review.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to comprehensively review empirical evidence on the effectiveness of Baduanjin exercise, one type of mind-body focused qigong exercise, on individuals' physical, cognitive, and mental well-being; outline potential mechanisms; and, suggest potential implication strategies for using Baduanjin in clinical practices and for future research. Methods: Recent randomized-controlled studies and systematic reviews/meta-analyses published in English were searched in PubMed, PsycINFO, and Scopus up to July 2022. The search terms include Baduanjin and sleep, chronic illness, cognition, mental health, etc. We only selected papers that specifically studied the health effects of Baduanjin, excluding those that involved other forms of Qigong or other traditional Chinese medical practices. Since many RCT studies have already been included in the review papers that we selected, only those not covered in the review papers were selected to avoid repetition. Results: 19 recent randomized-controlled studies and 8 systematic reviews were identified. In general, the effectiveness of Baduanjin exercise on individuals' physical, cognitive, and mental health is evident. Baduanjin has proven to be effective in improving sleep quality, including reducing difficulties in getting asleep and reducing daytime sleepiness. It also reduces fatigue and improves the quality of life for patients with other physical health issues, such as cancer, musculoskeletal pain, and chronic illnesses. The effectiveness of Baduanjin exercise is also evident in cognition, improving executive functions, and slowing down age-related cognitive deterioration. Similarly, Baduanjin alleviates various types of mental illnesses, increases patients' social competence, and enhances emotional regulation. Conclusion: There is initial evidence on the safety and efficacy of Baduanjin in improving individuals' various aspects of health and well-being, suggesting that Baduanjin may serve as an effective adjunct to conventional treatments for a variety of clinical health benefits. More research is needed to confirm the efficacy and safety of Baduanjin in other non-Chinese ethnic populations.

Subtype-based analysis of cell-in-cell structures in non-small cell lung cancer.

Lung cancer is ranked as the leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, and the development of novel biomarkers is helpful to improve the prognosis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Cell-in-cell structures (CICs), a novel functional surrogate of complicated cell behaviors, have shown promise in predicting the prognosis of cancer patients. However, the CIC profiling and its prognostic value remain unclear in NSCLC. In this study, we retrospectively explored the CIC profiling in a cohort of NSCLC tissues by using the "Epithelium-Macrophage-Leukocyte" (EML) method. The distribution of CICs was examined by the Chi-square test, and univariate and multivariate analyses were performed for survival analysis. Four types of CICs were identified in lung cancer tissues, namely, tumor-in-tumor (TiT), tumor-in-macrophage (TiM), lymphocyte-in-tumor (LiT), and macrophage-in-tumor (MiT). Among them, the latter three constituted the heterotypic CICs (heCICs). Overall, CICs were more frequently present in adenocarcinoma than in squamous cell carcinoma (P = 0.009), and LiT was more common in the upper lobe of the lung compared with other lobes (P = 0.020). In univariate analysis, the presence of TiM, heCIC density, TNM stage, T stage, and N stage showed association with the overall survival (OS) of NSCLC patients. Multivariate analysis revealed that heCICs (HR = 2.6, 95% CI 1.25-5.6) and lymph node invasion (HR = 2.6, 95% CI 1.33-5.1) were independent factors associated with the OS of NSCLC. Taken together, we profiled the CIC subtypes in NSCLC for the first time and demonstrated the prognostic value of heCICs, which may serve as a type of novel functional markers along with classical pathological factors in improving prognosis prediction for patients with NSCLC.

Transcriptome Analysis of the Mouse Medial Prefrontal Cortex in a Chronic Constriction Injury Model.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for both the sensory and emotional/cognitive components of pain. However, the underlying mechanism remains largely unknown. Here, we examined changes in the transcriptomic profiles in the mPFC of mice with chronic pain using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology. A mouse model of peripheral neuropathic pain was established via chronic constriction injury (CCI) of the sciatic nerve. CCI mice developed sustained mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia, as well as cognitive impairment four weeks after surgery. RNA-seq was conducted 4 weeks after CCI surgery. Compared with contral group, RNA-seq identified a total 309 and 222 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the ipsilateral and contralateral mPFC of CCI model mice, respectively. GO analysis indicated that the functions of these genes were mainly enriched in immune- and inflammation-related processes such as interferon-gamma production and cytokine secretion. KEGG analysis further showed the enrichment of genes involved in the neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction signaling pathway and Parkinson disease pathway that have been reported to be importantly involved in chronic neuralgia and cognitive dysfunction. Our study may provide insights into the possible mechanisms underlying neuropathic pain and pain-related comorbidities.

A Review of Cu-Ni-Sn Alloys: Processing, Microstructure, Properties, and Developing Trends.

Cu-Ni-Sn alloys have been widely used in the aerospace industry, the electronics industry, and other fields due to their excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, high strength, corrosion and wear resistance, etc., which make Cu-15Ni-8Sn alloys the perfect alternative to Cu-Be alloys. This paper begins with how Cu-Ni-Sn alloys are prepared. Then, the microstructural features, especially the precipitation order of each phase, are described. In addition, the influence of alloying elements, such as Si, Ti, and Nb, on its microstructure and properties is discussed. Finally, the effects of plastic deformation and heat treatment on Cu-Ni-Sn alloys are discussed. This review is able to provide insight into the development of novel Cu-Ni-Sn alloys with a high performance.

Spatiotemporally controllable diphtherin transgene system and neoantigen immunotherapy.

Individualized immunotherapy has attracted great attention due to its high specificity, effectiveness, and safety. We used an exogenous antigen to label tumor cells with MHC I molecules, which allowed neoantigen-specific T cells to recognize and kill tumor cells. A neoantigen vaccine alone cannot achieve complete tumor clearance due to a tumor immunosuppressive microenvironment. The LightOn system was developed to effectively eliminate tumor cells through the spatiotemporally controllable expression of diphtheria toxin A fragment, leading to antigen release in the tumor region. These antigens stimulated and enhanced immunological function and thus, recruited neoantigen-specific T cells to infiltrate tumor tissue. Using the nanoparticle delivery system, neoantigens produced higher delivery efficiency to lymph nodes and improved tumor targeting ability for tumor cell labelling. Good tumor inhibition and prolonged survival were achieved, while eliciting a strong immune response. The combination of a spatiotemporally controllable transgene system with tumor neoantigen labeling has great potential for tumor immunotherapy.

Physical exercise can enhance meaning in life of college students: the chain mediating role of self-efficacy and life satisfaction.

Meaning in life refers to an individual's capacity to understand and grasp the meaning of their own existence, as well as being aware of the goals, tasks, or missions in their personal life. Previous studies have found that college students lack meaning in life, but physical exercise can enhance it. In this study, 3,196 college students completed self-report questionnaires to assess self-efficacy, life satisfaction, physical exercise, and meaning in life. The results revealed that the physical exercise not only influenced an individual's perceived meaning in life directly, but also influenced it through self-efficacy. Furthermore, it confirmed the chain mediating role of self-efficacy and life satisfaction, whereby engaging in physical exercise can ultimately impact meaning in life through self-efficacy and life satisfaction. This discovery can help educators create interventions to improve college students' physical exercise engagement and overall life satisfaction.

HeadSLAM: Pedestrian SLAM with Head-Mounted Sensors.

Research focused on human position tracking with wearable sensors has been developing rapidly in recent years, and it has shown great potential for application within healthcare, smart homes, sports, and emergency services. Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) with Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) is one of the most promising solutions within this domain, as it does not rely on any additional infrastructure, whilst also being suitable for use in a diverse set of scenarios. However, PDR is only accurate for a limited period of time before unbounded errors, due to drift, affect the position estimate. Error correction can be difficult as there is often a lack of efficient methods for calibration. HeadSLAM, a method specifically designed for head-mounted IMUs, is proposed to improve the accuracy during longer tracking times (10 min). Research participants (n = 7) were asked to walk in both indoor and outdoor environments wearing head-mounted sensors, and the obtained HeadSLAM accuracy was subsequently compared to that of the PDR method. A significant difference (p < 0.001) in the average root-mean-squared error and absolute error was found between the two methods. HeadSLAM had a consist lower error across all scenarios and subjects in a 20 h walking dataset. The findings of this study show how the HeadSLAM algorithm can provide a more accurate long-term location service for head-mounted, low-cost sensors. The improved performance can support inexpensive applications for infrastructureless navigation.

Light-switchable diphtherin transgene system combined with losartan for triple negtative breast cancer therapy based on nano drug delivery system.

Breast cancer is a common malignancy in women. The abnormally dense collagen network in breast cancer forms a therapeutic barrier that hinders the penetration and anti-tumor effect of drugs. To overcome this hurdle, we adopted a therapeutic strategy to treat breast cancer which combined a light-switchable transgene system and losartan. The light-switchable transgene system could regulate expression of the diphtheria toxin A fragment (DTA) gene with a high on/off ratio under blue light and had great potential for spatiotemporally controllable gene expression. We developed a nanoparticle drug delivery system to achieve tumor microenvironment-responsive and targeted delivery of DTA-encoded plasmids (pDTA) to tumor sites via dual targeting to cluster of differentiation-44 and αvß3 receptors. In vivo studies indicated that the combination of pDTA and losartan reduce the concentration of collagen type I from 5.9 to 1.9 µg/g and decreased the level of active transforming growth factor-ß by 75.0% in tumor tissues. Moreover, deeper tumor penetration was achieved, tumor growth was inhibited, and the survival rate was increased. Our combination strategy provides a novel and practical method for clinical treatment of breast cancer.

Advances in biomedical study of the myopia-related signaling pathways and mechanisms.

Myopia has become one of the most critical health problems in the world with the increasing time spent indoors and increasing close work. Pathological myopia may have multiple complications, such as myopic macular degeneration, retinal detachment, cataracts, open-angle glaucoma, and severe cases that can cause blindness. Mounting evidence suggests that the cause of myopia can be attributed to the complex interaction of environmental exposure and genetic susceptibility. An increasing number of researchers have focused on the genetic pathogenesis of myopia in recent years. Scleral remodeling and excessive axial elongating induced retina thinning and even retinal detachment are myopia's most important pathological manifestations. The related signaling pathways are indispensable in myopia occurrence and development, such as dopamine, nitric oxide, TGF-ß, HIF-1α, etc. We review the current major and recent progress of biomedicine on myopia-related signaling pathways and mechanisms.

De-Doped Polyaniline as a Mediating Layer Promoting In-Situ Growth of Metal-Organic Frameworks on Cellulose Fiber and Enhancing Adsorptive-Photocatalytic Removal of Ciprofloxacin.

New kinds of inorganic-organic hybrid porous materials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), have shown great application potential in various fields, but their powdery nature limits their application to a certain extent. As a green and renewable biomass material in nature, cellulose fiber (CelF) has the advantages of biodegradability, recyclability and easy processing, and can be used as an excellent flexible substrate for MOFs. However, the efficient deposition of MOFs on CelF is still a great challenge for the development of this new material. Herein, polyaniline (PANI) and de-doped PANI (DPANI) with rich functional groups as a mediating layer was proposed to promote the in-situ growth and immobilization of some MOFs on CelF. The PANI (especially DPANI) layer greatly promoted the deposition of the four MOFs, and more encouragingly, significantly promoted the in-situ growth and nanocrystallization of MIL-100(Fe). MIL-100(Fe)@DPANI@CelF was selected as an adsorbent-photocatalyst to be used for the adsorptive-photocatalytic removal of ciprofloxacin (CIP) in water. The removal efficiency of CIP by MIL-100(Fe)@DPANI@CelF reached 82.78%, and the removal capacity of CIP was as high as 105.96 mg g-1. The study found that DPANI had a synergistic effect on both the in-situ growth of MIL-100(Fe) on CelF and the adsorption-photocatalysis of CIP in water. The universal platform of PANI-mediated in-situ growth and immobilization of MOFs on CelF constructed in this study widens the road for the development of MOF@CelF composites.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal and dark septate endophyte colonization in Artemisia roots responds differently to environmental gradients in eastern and central China.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and dark septate endophytes (DSE) are two types of root symbiotic fungi that enhance nutrient uptake by host plants and their resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, it remains unclear whether AMF and DSE are synergistic or antagonistic in the presence of host plants to environmental gradients, especially on large geographical scales. To determine the relationships between AMF and DSE and their adaptability on a regional scale, we measured AMF and DSE colonization in the roots of 1023 plants of different species within the Artemisia genus collected from 81 sites across central and eastern China. We used general linear mixed models to analyze the relationships between colonization, and temperature and precipitation conditions. We found no significant correlation between AMF and DSE. The AMF colonization rate followed a significant longitudinal trend, but there was no latitudinal pattern. DSE colonization did not follow any geographical pattern. The AMF colonization rate was positively correlated with temperature and precipitation, whereas it was not significantly correlated with soil. There was no significant correlation between DSE colonization and climate or soil. Our results suggest that AMF and DSE play independent roles in the response of Artemisia to the regional environment. Therefore, studies on mycorrhizal symbiosis should discern the differential responses between AMF and DSE to climate and soil when evaluating the adaptability of the two types of symbiosis on large geographical scales.

A Self-Training Approach for Point-Supervised Object Detection and Counting in Crowds.

In this article, we propose a novel self-training approach named Crowd-SDNet that enables a typical object detector trained only with point-level annotations (i.e., objects are labeled with points) to estimate both the center points and sizes of crowded objects. Specifically, during training, we utilize the available point annotations to supervise the estimation of the center points of objects directly. Based on a locally-uniform distribution assumption, we initialize pseudo object sizes from the point-level supervisory information, which are then leveraged to guide the regression of object sizes via a crowdedness-aware loss. Meanwhile, we propose a confidence and order-aware refinement scheme to continuously refine the initial pseudo object sizes such that the ability of the detector is increasingly boosted to detect and count objects in crowds simultaneously. Moreover, to address extremely crowded scenes, we propose an effective decoding method to improve the detector's representation ability. Experimental results on the WiderFace benchmark show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art point-supervised methods under both detection and counting tasks, i.e., our method improves the average precision by more than 10% and reduces the counting error by 31.2%. Besides, our method obtains the best results on the crowd counting and localization datasets (i.e., ShanghaiTech and NWPU-Crowd) and vehicle counting datasets (i.e., CARPK and PUCPR+) compared with state-of-the-art counting-by-detection methods. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/WangyiNTU/Point-supervised-crowd-detection.