Electroacupuncture improves articular microcirculation and attenuates cartilage hypoxia in a male rabbit model of knee osteoarthritis.

Background And Aim: Hypoxia of the cartilage has been considered as a potential pathogenic factor in knee osteoarthritis (KOA). Studies have shown that impaired blood perfusion of joint leads to cartilage hypoxia. Electroacupuncture (EA) has proven effects on pain relief and improving microcirculation.

Triplet Adaptation Framework for Robust Semi-Supervised Learning.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) suffers from severe performance degradation when labeled and unlabeled data come from inconsistent and imbalanced distribution. Nonetheless, there is a lack of theoretical guidance regarding a remedy for this issue. To bridge the gap between theoretical insights and practical solutions, we embark to an analysis of generalization bound of classic SSL algorithms.

Acupotomy alleviates knee osteoarthritis in rabbit by regulating chondrocyte mitophagy Pink1-Parkin pathway.

Objective: To investigate the effect of acupotomy, on mitophagy and the Pink1-Parkin pathway in chondrocytes from rabbits with knee osteoarthritis (KOA).

Methods: A KOA model was established the modified Videman method. Rabbits were randomly divided into a control group (CON), KOA group and KOA + acupotomy group (Acu).

Enhancing Face Recognition With Detachable Self-Supervised Bypass Networks.

Attributed to the development of deep networks and abundant data, automatic face recognition (FR) has quickly reached human-level capacity in the past few years. However, the FR problem is not perfectly solved in case of large poses and uncontrolled occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel bypass enhanced representation learning (BERL) method to improve face recognition under unconstrained scenarios.

Event Graph Guided Compositional Spatial-Temporal Reasoning for Video Question Answering.

Video question answering (VideoQA) is challenging since it requires the model to extract and combine multi-level visual concepts from local objects to global actions from complex events for compositional reasoning. Existing works represent the video with fixed-duration clip features that make the model struggle in capturing the crucial concepts in multiple granularities. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose to represent the video with an Event Graph in a hierarchical structure whose nodes correspond to visual concepts of different levels (object, relation, scene and action) and edges indicate their spatial-temporal relationships.

SurgNet: Self-Supervised Pretraining With Semantic Consistency for Vessel and Instrument Segmentation in Surgical Images.

Blood vessel and surgical instrument segmentation is a fundamental technique for robot-assisted surgical navigation. Despite the significant progress in natural image segmentation, surgical image-based vessel and instrument segmentation are rarely studied. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised pretraining method (SurgNet) that can effectively learn representative vessel and instrument features from unlabeled surgical images.

Variation in Competence of Graduating General Surgery Trainees.

Objective: To examine the readiness of general surgery residents in their final year of training to perform 5 common surgical procedures based on their documented performance during training.

Design: Intraoperative performance ratings were analyzed using a Bayesian mixed effects approach, adjusting for rater, trainee, procedure, case complexity, and postgraduate year (PGY) as random effects as well as month in academic year and cumulative, procedure-specific performance per trainee as fixed effects. This model was then used to estimate each PGY 5 trainee's final probability of being able to independently perform each procedure.

Evaluating Educational Outcomes Using Patient Outcomes of New Surgeons Performing Partial Colectomy Compared to Cholecystectomy.

Purpose: Despite ongoing efforts to improve surgical education, surgical residents face gaps in their training. However, it is unknown if differences in the training of surgeons are reflected in the patient outcomes of those surgeons once they enter practice. This study aimed to compare the patient outcomes among new surgeons performing partial colectomy-a common procedure for which training is limited-and cholecystectomy-a common procedure for which training is robust.

Application of Acupotomy in a Knee Osteoarthritis Model in Rabbit.

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is one of the most frequently encountered diseases in the orthopedic department, which seriously reduces the quality of life of people with KOA. Among several pathogenic factors, the biomechanical imbalance of the knee joint is one of the main causes of KOA. Acupotomology believes that restoring the mechanical balance of the knee joint is the key to treating KOA.

Electroacupuncture Exerts Chondroprotective Effect in Knee Osteoarthritis of Rabbits Through the Mitophagy Pathway.

Purpose: Mitochondrial dysfunction of chondrocytes has become an area of focus in Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) in recent years. Activation of mitophagy could promote the survival of chondrocytes and alleviate cartilage degeneration. The aim of this study was to explore whether mitophagy was involved in the cartilage protection of KOA rabbits after electroacupuncture (EA) intervention.

BLPSeg: Balance the Label Preference in Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation.

Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation is an appealing weakly supervised technique with low labeling cost. Existing approaches mainly consider diffusing the labeled region of scribble by low-level feature similarity to narrow the supervision gap between scribble labels and mask labels. In this study, we observe an annotation bias between scribble and object mask, i.

[Effect of acupotomy on expressions of cellular senescence markers p16Ink4a and p21Waf1/Cip1 in cartilage tissue of rabbits with knee osteoarthritis].

Objective: To observe the effect of acupotomy on the expressions of p16 and p21 in knee osteoarthritis (KOA) rabbits，so as to analyze whether acupotomy can treat KOA by inhibiting the cellular senescence of chondrocytes.

Methods: Twenty-four New Zealand male rabbits were randomly divided into normal, model, acupotomy and electroacupuncture (EA) groups, with 6 rabbits in each group. The KOA model was established by left hindlimb straightening fixation.

Acupotomy ameliorates subchondral bone absorption and mechanical properties in rabbits with knee osteoarthritis by regulating bone morphogenetic protein 2-Smad1 pathway.

Objective: To investigate the effects of acupotomy on the subchondral bone absorption and mechanical properties in rabbits with knee osteoarthritis (KOA).

Methods: The rabbits were divided into blank control, model, acupotomy and electroacupuncture (EA) groups, with 12 rabbits in each. Modified Videman's method was used to prepare KOA model.

Dual Compensation Residual Networks for Class Imbalanced Learning.

Learning generalizable representation and classifier for class-imbalanced data is challenging for data-driven deep models. Most studies attempt to re-balance the data distribution, which is prone to overfitting on tail classes and underfitting on head classes. In this work, we propose Dual Compensation Residual Networks to better fit both tail and head classes.

Early findings and strategies for successful implementation of SIMPL workplace-based assessments within vascular surgery residency and fellowship programs.

Objective: As medical education systems increasingly move toward competency-based training, it is important to understand the tools available to assess competency and how these tools are utilized. The Society for Improving Medical Professional Learning (SIMPL) offers a smart phone-based assessment system that supports workplace-based assessment of residents' and fellows' operative autonomy, performance, and case complexity. The purpose of this study was to characterize implementation of the SIMPL app within vascular surgery integrated residency (0+5) and fellowship (5+2) training programs.

CMOS-GAN: Semi-supervised Generative Adversarial Model for Cross-Modality Face Image Synthesis.

Cross-modality face image synthesis such as sketch-to-photo, NIR-to-RGB, and RGB-to-depth has wide applications in face recognition, face animation, and digital entertainment. Conventional cross-modality synthesis methods usually require paired training data, i.e.

Acupotomy Improves Synovial Hypoxia, Synovitis and Angiogenesis in KOA Rabbits.

Purpose: Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a chronic inflammatory disease highly associated with intra-articular hypertension, hypoxia and angiogenesis of synovial tissue. Our previous studies showed that acupotomy could treat KOA in a variety of ways, including reducing cartilage deterioration and enhancing biomechanical qualities. However, the mechanism of hypoxia and angiogenesis induced by acupotomy in KOA synovium remains unclear.

Association of Surgical Resident Competency Ratings With Patient Outcomes.

Purpose: Accurate assessment of clinical performance is essential to ensure graduating residents are competent for unsupervised practice. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education milestones framework is the most widely used competency-based framework in the United States. However, the relationship between residents' milestones competency ratings and their subsequent early career clinical outcomes has not been established.

Scaffold hopping via ring opening enables identification of acyclic compounds as new complement Factor D inhibitors.

The three complement pathways comprising the early phase of the complement system (the classical, lectin, and alternative pathways) act together with the innate and adaptive immune systems to protect against foreign entities and maintain tissue homeostasis. While these systems are normally under tight regulatory control, several diseases have been reported to correlate with uncontrolled activation and amplification of the alternative pathway, including paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome, C3 glomerulopathy, and age-related macular degeneration. Complement FactorD (CFD), a serine protease, is the rate-limiting enzyme for the activity of alternative pathway.

Discovery and optimization of orally bioavailable and potent plasma Kallikrein inhibitors bearing a quaternary carbon.

Hereditary angioedema (HAE) is a rare and potentially life-threatening disease that affects an estimated 1 in 50,000 individuals worldwide. Berotralstat (BCX7353) is the only small molecule approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the prophylactic treatment of HAE attacks in patients 12 years and older. During the discovery of BCX7353, we also identified a novel series of small molecules containing a quaternary carbon as potent and orally bioavailable Plasma Kallikrein (PKal) inhibitors.