Vortexing-generated high throughput single-cell droplets for facile analysis of multiplexed microRNA dynamic secretion.

Discriminating secretory phenotypes provides a direct, intact, and dynamic way to evaluate the heterogeneity in cell states and activation, which is significant for dissecting non-genetic heterogeneity for human health studies and disease diagnostics. In particular, secreted microRNAs, soluble signaling molecules released by various cells, are increasingly recognized as a critical mediator for cell-cell communication and the circulating biomarkers for disease diagnosis. However, single-cell analysis of secreted miRNAs is still lacking due to the limited available tools. Herein, we realized three-plexed miRNA secretion analysis over four time points from single cells encapsulated in picoliter droplets with extreme simplicity, coupling vortexing-generated single-cell droplets with multiplexed molecular beacons. Notably, our platform only requires pipetting and vortexing steps to finish the assay setup within 5 min with minimal training, and customized software was developed for automatic data quantification. Applying the platform to human cancer cell lines and primary cells revealed previously undifferentiated heterogeneity and paracrine signaling underlying miRNA secretion. This platform can be used to dissect secretion heterogeneity and cell-cell interactions and has the potential to become a widely used tool in biomedical research.

The effect of incentive spirometry in perioperative patients with lung cancer-a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Incentive spirometry (IS) as a routine respiratory therapy during the perioperative period has been widely used in clinical practice. However, the impact of IS on patients with perioperative lung cancer remains controversial. This review aimed to evaluate the efficacy of IS in perioperative pulmonary rehabilitation for patients with lung cancer. METHODS: Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science, Ovid, CINAHL, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Weipu, and Wanfang Databases were searched from inception to 30 November 2023. Only randomized controlled trials were included in this systematic review. The PRISMA checklist served as the guidance for conducting this review. The quality assessment of the included studies was assessed by the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool. The meta-analysis was carried out utilizing Review Manager 5.4. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis and subgroup analysis were also performed. RESULTS: Nine studies recruited 1209 patients met our inclusion criteria. IS combined with other respiratory therapy techniques was observed to reduce the incidence of postoperative pulmonary complications, enhance pulmonary function, curtail the length of hospital stay, and lower the Borg score. Nevertheless, no improvements were found in the six-minute walk distance or quality of life score. CONCLUSIONS: Although IS demonstrates benefits as a component of comprehensive intervention measures for perioperative patients with lung cancer, it proves challenging to determine the precise impact of IS as a standalone component within the comprehensive intervention measures. Therefore, further researches are required to better understand the effectiveness of IS isolation and its interactions when integrated with additional respiratory therapies for these patients. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: PROSPERO, https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/ , registry number: CRD42022321044.

Hot-air-assisted radio frequency blanching of broccoli: heating uniformity, physicochemical parameters, bioactive compounds, and microstructure.

BACKGROUND: Vegetables are often blanched before drying. The hot-water blanching (HWB) of broccoli reduces quality and is environmentally harmful. In this work, hot-air-assisted radio frequency heating blanching (HA-RFB) of broccoli was developed for use before further drying processes. Blanching sufficiency, heating uniformity, and heating rate during HA-RFB were investigated to improve the product's physicochemical properties and texture. Suitable heating conditions were achieved when HA-RFB was applied with hot air at 70 °C, with an electrode gap of 10.7 cm, using a cylindrical container for the broccoli. RESULTS: Under these conditions, the relative peroxidase activity in broccoli decreased to 3.26% within 117 s, with 13.45% of weight loss. In comparison with HWB broccoli, the products blanched by HA-RFB preserved their texture, bioactive compounds, and microstructure better. The ascorbic acid, sulforaphane, and total glucosinolate content in HA-RFB products were 251.1%, 131.9% and 36.7% higher than those in HWB broccoli, and HA-RFB treatment led to a greater weight loss (13.45 ± 0.50%) than HWB (8.70 ± 1.70%), which is very helpful for the subsequent drying process. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated that HA-RFB could be a promising substitute for HWB to blanch broccoli and other flower vegetables, especially as a pretreatment in the drying process. © 2023 Society of Chemical Industry.

toxCSM: comprehensive prediction of small molecule toxicity profiles.

Drug discovery is a lengthy, costly and high-risk endeavour that is further convoluted by high attrition rates in later development stages. Toxicity has been one of the main causes of failure during clinical trials, increasing drug development time and costs. To facilitate early identification and optimisation of toxicity profiles, several computational tools emerged aiming at improving success rates by timely pre-screening drug candidates. Despite these efforts, there is an increasing demand for platforms capable of assessing both environmental as well as human-based toxicity properties at large scale. Here, we present toxCSM, a comprehensive computational platform for the study and optimisation of toxicity profiles of small molecules. toxCSM leverages on the well-established concepts of graph-based signatures, molecular descriptors and similarity scores to develop 36 models for predicting a range of toxicity properties, which can assist in developing safer drugs and agrochemicals. toxCSM achieved an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve (AUC) of up to 0.99 and Pearson's correlation coefficients of up to 0.94 on 10-fold cross-validation, with comparable performance on blind test sets, outperforming all alternative methods. toxCSM is freely available as a user-friendly web server and API at http://biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/toxcsm.

Research on Chest Disease Recognition Based on Deep Hierarchical Learning Algorithm.

Chest X-ray has become one of the most common ways in diagnostic radiology exams, and this technology assists expert radiologists with finding the patients at potential risk of cardiopathy and lung diseases. However, it is still a challenge for expert radiologists to assess thousands of cases in a short period so that deep learning methods are introduced to tackle this problem. Since the diseases have correlations with each other and have hierarchical features, the traditional classification scheme could not achieve a good performance. In order to extract the correlation features among the diseases, some GCN-based models are introduced to combine the features extracted from the images to make prediction. This scheme can work well with the high quality of image features, so backbone with high computation cost plays a vital role in this scheme. However, a fast prediction in diagnostic radiology is also needed especially in case of emergency or region with low computation facilities, so we proposed an efficient convolutional neural network with GCN, which is named SGGCN, to meet the need of efficient computation and considerable accuracy. SGGCN used SGNet-101 as backbone, which is built by ShuffleGhost Block (Huang et al., 2021) to extract features with a low computation cost. In order to make sufficient usage of the information in GCN, a new GCN architecture is designed to combine information from different layers together in GCNM module so that we can utilize various hierarchical features and meanwhile make the GCN scheme faster. The experiment on CheXPert datasets illustrated that SGGCN achieves a considerable performance. Compared with GCN and ResNet-101 (He et al., 2015) backbone (test AUC 0.8080, parameters 4.7M and FLOPs 16.0B), the SGGCN achieves 0.7831 (-3.08%) test AUC with parameters 1.2M (-73.73%) and FLOPs 3.1B (-80.82%), where GCN with MobileNet (Sandler and Howard, 2018) backbone achieves 0.7531 (-6.79%) test AUC with parameters 0.5M (-88.46%) and FLOPs 0.66B (-95.88%).

Experimental Investigation of the Rapid Fabrication of Micron and Submicron Structures on Polymers Utilizing Ultrasonic Assisted Embossing.

Small-scale optical components with micron or submicron features have grown in popularity in recent years. High-quality, high-efficient, and cost-effective processing approaches for polymer optics mass production are an urgent need. In this study, ultrasonic vibration will be introduced in embossing. The major advantage is that the required energy can be provided for process times ranging from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds, and that the process energy is provided at exactly the required location so that the structures in the surrounding area are not affected. Due to the strong correlation between electrical impedance and the temperature of the material, a novel impedance-based control strategy has been utilized for precisely controlling ultrasonic vibration during the embossing process. The investigation used two types of stamps with grating line widths of 4 µm and 500 nm, respectively. As a result, an embossing time of less than a few seconds was accomplished and a uniform embossed surface with an average fill rate of more than 75% could be achieved.

Impacts of ultrasound on oxide removal - An attempt towards acid-free cleaning.

Strong or mid-strong acids are always used to remove oxides from part surfaces in remanufacturing, painting, metallurgical and mineral industries, which is not environmentally benign. In this work, a green cleaning method - ultrasonic (US) cleaning with distilled water is proposed. The impacts of ultrasonic cleaning process parameters including the distance between the sonotrode end surface and the specimen surface, the vibration amplitude, the process time and the concentration of oxalic acid, on the surface oxide removal rate were systematically studied based on a Box-Behnken Design. The results show a significant increase of the oxide removal rate on the specimen surface with the decrease of the distance, the increase of the vibration amplitude, the increase of the process time and the presence of oxalic acid. Based on the experimental results, an empirical model was established to quantitatively describe the effects of these factors on the oxide removal rate. In addition to all the linear factors, the square factors of time and the concentration of oxalic acid as well as the interaction factors among time, driving current and the concentration of oxalic acid are significant on the oxide removal. Compared to the cleaning with acids, a high level removal rate is still achievable with acid-free distilled water even though the process window gets narrower. This study enhances the potential application of US cleaning on oxide removal with a small amount of weak acid or without any acid in the cleaning liquid in industries.

Theoretical and experimental investigations of ultrasonic sound fields in thin bubbly liquid layers for ultrasonic cavitation peening.

Ultrasonic cavitation peening is a potential surface enhancement process. During this process a high input power is necessary to obtain an effective process result. A small gap, usually less than 1 mm, between the sonotrode tip and the treated surface is also required to avoid substantial energy loss. Due to the high vibration of the sonotrode, many cavitation bubbles are generated, forming a thin bubbly liquid layer in the small gap. The cavitation bubbles in the layer seriously disturb the sound wave propagation and interact with each other. The disturbances and interactions change the intensity and the spatial distribution of cavitation bubbles, resulting in the different interactions between cavitation bubbles and workpiece surfaces. The variations of the interactions cause different surface properties of the workpieces after ultrasonic cavitation peening. Therefore, quantifying the ultrasound field in different conditions is of great important to improve the ultrasonic cavitation peening process. A current model of the sound propagation in the bubbly liquid was already developed but did not include the bubble interactions. In this work, the bubble interactions are taken into account to improve the current model. The calculated results of the sound field with the improved model are validated by sonochemiluminescence experiments in various standoff distances and vibration amplitudes. Both of the experimental and the calculated results show that the highest sound pressure is generated when the vibration amplitude is around 25 µm. The strongest cavitation intensity occurs at the gap width of 0.5-0.7 mm.

Capability evaluation of ultrasonic cavitation peening at different standoff distances.

Ultrasonic cavitation peening is a novel surface treatment technology which utilizes the effect of cavitation bubble collapses to improve the properties of metal surfaces. In order to obtain high impact during ultrasonic cavitation peening, a small standoff distance between a sound radiator and a rigid reflector (the surface of treated specimen) is necessary. However, the effects of different standoff distances on the capability of ultrasonic cavitation peening are not yet clear. In this paper, a simplified model was developed to evaluate the cavitation capability at different standoff distances. Meanwhile, to validate the theoretical model, the plastic deformation or erosion on the peening surface before and after treatment were compared. It was found that at a very small standoff distance the impact pressure generated by cavitation bubbles did not cause much deformation or erosion, as the dynamics of cavitation bubbles was limited. At a large standoff distance, due to much attenuation of sound propagation in the bubbly liquid, little impact pressure was generated by the collapse of cavitation bubbles and reached the treated surface. A fixed vibration amplitude, however, corresponded to a standoff distance which caused the largest deformation or erosion on the treated surface.