Due to unsatisfactory tumor-targeting efficiency, hitch-hiking nanomedicines with tumor "smelling" immune cells have rapidly evolved to achieve a more precision delivery. However, the current research tends to default to the smelling capacity of neutrophils and largely overlooks the capacity of those immune cells that are heavily dependent on the pathogen exposure history of individuals. By avoiding risky strategies, such as altering the housing environment of mice for the improved activity of immune cells, we propose a new concept of nano-immunotraining strategy to quickly activate neutrophil tumor tropism and thereby give an enhanced tumor-targeting capacity. Such a strategy involves a facile construction of a vaccine-like nano-CpG adjuvant, followed by pre-immunizing on mice periodically to mimic the pathogen exposure. The results demonstrated that a significantly enhanced tumor-targeting accumulation of neutrophils harvested from nano-immunotrained mice could be achieved, either by intraperitoneal or intravenous injection. This easily accessed, reproducible, and biosafe nano-immunotraining strategy holds a great promise for more precision delivery of nanomedicines.
Genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM) negatively affects more than half of postmenopausal women. Energy-based therapy has been explored as a minimally invasive treatment for GSM; however, its mechanism of action and efficacy is controversial. Here, we report on a pilot imaging study conducted on a small group of menopause patients undergoing laser treatment. Intravaginal optical coherence tomography (OCT) endoscope was used to quantitatively monitor the changes in the vaginal epithelial thickness (VET) during fractional-pixel CO
A new pentanorlanostane, ganosineniol A (1), eight new lanostane triterpenoids, ganosinoside A (2), ganoderic acid Jc (3), ganoderic acid Jd (4), ganodermatetraol (5), ganolucidic acid γa (6), ganolucidate F (7), ganoderiol J (8), and methyl lucidenate Ha (9), and a new sesquiterpenoid, ganosinensine (10), together with eleven known triterpenoids (11–21), were isolated from the fruiting bodies of the fungus Ganoderma sinense. Chemical structures were determined based on spectroscopic evidence, including 1D, 2D NMR, and mass spectral data. Furthermore, all isolates were tested for cytotoxic activity and induction ability of hPXR-mediated CYP3A4 expression. Among them, ganoderic acid Jc (3) displayed selective inhibitory activity against HL-60 cells (IC50 = 8.30 µM), and ganoderiol E (11) exhibited selective cytotoxic activity against MCF-7 cells (IC50 = 6.35 µM). Meanwhile, compounds 5, 7, and ganolucidic acids B and C (19, 20) showed induction ability of hPXR-mediated CYP3A4 expression.
Optical coherence elastography (OCE) is an emerging imaging modality for the assessment of mechanical properties in soft tissues. Transverse shear wave measurements using OCE can quantify the elastic moduli perpendicular to the force direction, however, missing the elastic information along the force direction. In this study, we developed coaxial excitation longitudinal shear wave measurements for quantification of elastic moduli along the force direction using M-scans. Incorporating Rayleigh wave measurements using non-coaxial lateral scans into longitudinal shear wave measurements, directionally dependent elastic properties can be quantified along the force direction and perpendicular to the force direction. Therefore, the reported system has the capability to image elasticity of anisotropic biological tissues.
Accurate segmentation of organs at risk (OARs) is a key step in treatment planning system (TPS) of image guided radiation therapy. We are developing three classes of methods to segment 17 organs at risk throughout the whole body, including brain, brain stem, eyes, mandible, temporomandibular joints, parotid glands, spinal cord, lungs, trachea, heart, livers, kidneys, spleen, prostate, rectum, femoral heads, and skin. The three classes of segmentation methods include (1) threshold-based methods for organs of large contrast with adjacent structures such as lungs, trachea, and skin; (2) context-driven Generalized Hough Transform-based methods combined with graph cut algorithm for robust localization and segmentation of liver, kidneys and spleen; and (3) atlas and registration-based methods for segmentation of heart and all organs in CT volumes of head and pelvis. The segmentation accuracy for the seventeen organs was subjectively evaluated by two medical experts in three levels of score: 0, poor (unusable in clinical practice); 1, acceptable (minor revision needed); and 2, good (nearly no revision needed). A database was collected from Ruijin Hospital, Huashan Hospital, and Xuhui Central Hospital in Shanghai, China, including 127 head scans, 203 thoracic scans, 154 abdominal scans, and 73 pelvic scans. The percentages of "good" segmentation results were 97.6%, 92.9%, 81.1%, 87.4%, 85.0%, 78.7%, 94.1%, 91.1%, 81.3%, 86.7%, 82.5%, 86.4%, 79.9%, 72.6%, 68.5%, 93.2%, 96.9% for brain, brain stem, eyes, mandible, temporomandibular joints, parotid glands, spinal cord, lungs, trachea, heart, livers, kidneys, spleen, prostate, rectum, femoral heads, and skin, respectively. Various organs at risk can be reliably segmented from CT scans by use of the three classes of segmentation methods.
Endoscopic imaging technologies, such as endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT), near infrared (NIR) fluorescence, photoacoustic (PA), and ultrasound (US) have been used to investigate vascular and morphological changes as hallmarks of early cancer in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Here, we developed two multimodality imaging systems which are integrated PA/US and integrated OCT/NIR fluorescence which can obtain layered architecture and vasculature simultaneously. In vivo imaging of rectum wall from Sprague Dawley (SD) rats with these two imaging systems were demonstrated. Both imaging systems enable the use of one imaging probe for performing two different imaging, thereby improving prognosis by early detection and reducing costs. For integrated PA/US, the architectural morphology and vasculature of the rectum wall were visualized without the usage of contrast agent, but slow imaging speed and usage of match medium are the main limitations for clinical translation. With regard to the integrated OCT/NIR fluorescence, it is able to perform high speed imaging, however the addition of contrast agent and limited imaging depth are the main concern for clinical application.
Pulse diagnosis is of great research significance and practical value in clinical diagnosis. However, current research has focused on objectifying the pulse signal and has neglected the influence of the TCM constitution on the pulse signal and disease. The effective utilization of constitution factors is the urgent need for pulse analysis and the incorporation of constitution factors into pulse diagnosis to diagnose hypertension will help to improve the TCM connotation of pulse diagnosis. To solve the problems, we first developed a simple, convenient, and noninvasive multichannel pulse sampler, and constructed a public pulse dataset. Then we propose a pulse preprocessing framework, which integrates four pulse preprocessing operations. This method makes the pulse preprocessing operation more efficient. Then we used statistical analysis to determine the hypertension susceptibility constitution factors. The results showed that Yang-deficiency (YaD), Yin-deficiency (YiD), and Phlegm-dampness (PD) were significantly correlated with whether the subjects suffered from hypertension. The pulse feature samples that included hypertension susceptibility constitution factors had the highest classification accuracy in distinguishing between the two types of healthy samples and hypertensive samples. This shows that the inclusion of constitution factors in the pulse features is important for disease classification.
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an automatic tracking system which has been widely applied in the fields of intelligent transportation systems, e.g., collision avoidance, navigation, maritime supervision and management. Compare with other positioning systems, e.g., very high frequency (VHF) and radar, AIS can conquer the human errors and it is almost not affected by the external environment. To make better use of the AIS data, it is necessary to statistically analyze the massive AIS trajectories. The statistical results could make us better understand the potential properties of AIS trajectories. It is well known that most current practical applications are strongly dependent on the geometrical structures of AIS trajectories. In this paper, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is introduced to investigate the longitude and latitude differences of AIS trajectory data. The parameters of GMM are estimated using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The experimental results have illustrated the superior performance of our proposed method.
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