A xenogenic-free culture medium for cell micro-patterning systems as cell-instructive biomaterials for potential clinical applications.

Cell micro-patterning controls cell fate and function and has potential for generating therapeutically usable mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) populations with precise functions. However, to date, the micro-patterning of human cells in a translational context has been impossible because only ruminant media supplements, e.g.

Simple Methodology to Score Micropattern Quality and Effectiveness.

Micropatterns (MPs) are widely used as a powerful tool to control cell morphology and phenotype. However, methods for determining the effectiveness of how well cells are controlled by the shape of MPs have been inconsistently used and studies rarely report on this topic, indicating lack of standardization. We introduce an evaluation score that quantitatively assesses the MP fabrication quality and effectiveness, which can be broadly used in conjunction with all currently available MP design types.

A mechanism linking ferroptosis and ferritinophagy in melatonin-related improvement of diabetic brain injury.

Ferroptosis and ferritinophagy play critical roles in various disease contexts. Herein, we observed that ferroptosis and ferritinophagy were induced both in the brains of mice with diabetes mellitus (DM) and neuronal cells after high glucose (HG) treatment, as evidenced by decreases in GPX4, SLC7A11, and ferritin levels, but increases in NCOA4 levels. Interestingly, melatonin administration ameliorated neuronal damage by inhibiting ferroptosis and ferritinophagy both and .

BAG-Net: a boundary detection and multiple attention-guided network for liver ultrasound image automatic segmentation in ultrasound guided surgery.

Automated segmentation of targets in ultrasound (US) images during US-guided liver surgery holds the potential to assist physicians in fast locating critical areas such as blood vessels and lesions. However, this remains a challenging task primarily due to the image quality issues associated with US, including blurred edges and low contrast. In addition, studies specifically targeting liver segmentation are relatively scarce possibly since studying deep abdominal organs under US is difficult.

An automatic cephalometric landmark detection method based on heatmap regression and Monte Carlo dropout.

Cephalometric analysis plays an important role in orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning. It depends on the detection of multiple landmarks, while the process is time-consuming and tedious. Although some deep learning-based automatic landmark detection algorithms have achieved excellent performance, most of them adopt multi-stage models increasing the complexity and detection time.

The effect of allyl isothiocyanate on chondrocyte phenotype is matrix stiffness-dependent: Possible involvement of TRPA1 activation.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic joint disease with increasing prevalence. Chondrocytes (CHs) are highly differentiated end-stage cells with a secretory phenotype that keeps the extracellular matrix (ECM) balanced and the cartilage environment stable. Osteoarthritis dedifferentiation causes cartilage matrix breakdown, accounting for one of the key pathogenesis of osteoarthritis.

Differentially expressed tRNA-derived fragments and their roles in primary cardiomyocytes stimulated by high glucose.

Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a serious complication of diabetes mellitus that can cause malignant arrhythmia and sudden death and is associated with cardiomyocyte dysfunction induced by hyperglycemia. Emerging evidence has revealed that transfer RNA-derived fragments (tRFs), a novel class of noncoding RNAs, play a crucial role in a variety of pathophysiologic processes, including cell death, cell growth and proliferation. However, it remains unknown whether and how tRFs are involved in cardiomyocyte dysfunction during the progression of DCM.

Resource allocation algorithm of an indoor OFDMA VLC system.

In this work, a resource management algorithm is proposed for an indoor visible light communication (VLC) access network using an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme. With OFDMA, adaptive modulation is adopted to improve the frequency spectrum efficiency of this VLC system. Specifically, the long-term time-averaged optimization problem is transformed into a series of single timeslot online problems via a Lyapunov optimization technique.

[Corrigendum] High glucose promotes hepatic fibrosis via miR‑32/MTA3‑mediated epithelial‑to‑mesenchymal transition.

Subsequently to the publication of this paper, the authors have realized that Fig. 2 was published containing some incorrectly assembled data panels. The E‑cadherin control data panel in Fig.

Feature pyramid self-attention network for respiratory motion prediction in ultrasound image guided surgery.

Purpose: The robot-assisted automated puncture system under ultrasound guidance can well improve the puncture accuracy in ablation surgery. The automated puncture system requires advanced definition of the puncture location, while the displacement of thoracic-abdominal tumors caused by respiratory motion makes it difficult for the system to locate the best puncture position. Predicting tumor motion is an effective way to help the automated puncture system output a more accurate puncture position.

Exogenous Parathyroid Hormone Alleviates Intervertebral Disc Degeneration through the Sonic Hedgehog Signalling Pathway Mediated by CREB.

As an important hormone that regulates the balance of calcium and phosphorus, parathyroid hormone (PTH) has also been found to have an important function in intervertebral disc degeneration (IVDD). Our aim was to investigate the mechanism by which PTH alleviates IVDD. In this study, the PTH 1 receptor was found to be highly expressed in severely degenerated human nucleus pulposus (NP) cells.

Micro-patterned cell populations as advanced pharmaceutical drugs with precise functional control.

Human cells are both advanced pharmaceutical drugs and 'drug deliverers'. However, functional control prior to or after cell implantation remains challenging. Micro-patterning cells through geometrically defined adhesion sites allows controlling morphogenesis, polarity, cellular mechanics, proliferation, migration, differentiation, stemness, cell-cell interactions, collective cell behavior, and likely immuno-modulatory properties.

Rebalance of the Polyamine Metabolism Suppresses Oxidative Stress and Delays Senescence in Nucleus Pulposus Cells.

Intervertebral disk degeneration (IDD) is a major cause of low back pain that becomes a prevalent age-related disease. However, the pathophysiological processes behind IDD are rarely known. Here, we used bioinformatics analysis based on the microarray datasets (GSE34095) to identify the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) as biomarkers and therapeutic targets in degenerated discs.

Multi-feature Multi-Scale CNN-Derived COVID-19 Classification from Lung Ultrasound Data.

The global pandemic of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has put tremendous pressure on the medical system. Imaging plays a complementary role in the management of patients with COVID-19. Computed tomography (CT) and chest X-ray (CXR) are the two dominant screening tools.

Transmission rate Optimization by dynamic resource allocation algorithm for RF/VLC heterogeneous networks.

In this work, a dynamic resource allocation (DRA) algorithm is proposed to optimize the transmission rate subject to the access point assignment, bandwidth and transmit power allocation in RF/VLC heterogeneous networks, which combines the visible light communication (VLC) access point (AP) and radio frequency (RF) AP. To optimize the allocation among resource block (RB), subchannel and power, the time-average transmission rate is maximized under time-average transmit power budget. Specifically, the time-average optimization problem is converted into series of single timeslot online problem by Lyapunov optimization technique.

Uniformity improvement on received optical power for an indoor visible light communication system with an angle diversity receiver.

In this work, an angle diversity receiver (ADR) structure is proposed to optimize the uniformity of the received optical power distribution in an indoor visible light communication (VLC) system. Taking the rectangular and hybrid layouts with 16 light-emitting diodes as examples, different inclination angles and the number of side detectors are investigated with three diversity combining techniques in a typical room, where the primary reflection of the wall is considered. Simulation results showed that the inclination angles and the number of side detectors would affect the variance and average of the received optical power, and the variance would decrease with the increase of the number of side detectors.

Pharmacological Disruption of Phosphorylated Eukaryotic Initiation Factor-2α/Activating Transcription Factor 4/Indian Hedgehog Protects Intervertebral Disc Degeneration via Reducing the Reactive Oxygen Species and Apoptosis of Nucleus Pulposus Cells.

Excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) and apoptosis in nucleus pulposus (NP) cells accelerate the process of intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD). Here, we integrated pathological samples and and framework to investigate the impact of phosphorylation of eukaryotic initiation factor-2α (eIF2α)/activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4)/Indian hedgehog (Ihh) signaling in the IDD. From the specimen analysis of the IDD patients, we found phosphorylated eIF2α (p-eIF2α), ATF4 and Ihh protein levels were positively related while the NP tissue went degenerative.

JianpiQinghua granule reduced PPI dosage in patients with nonerosive reflux disease: A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, double-dummy, noninferiority study.

Background: Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) play an important role in the treatment of nonerosive reflux disease (NERD), but their long-term and excessive uses have been associated with safety concerns. Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has become a popular alternative treatment for this condition.

Methods: A total of 204 patients were randomly assigned to the combination group or PPI group (1:1 ratio).

Pancreas segmentation with probabilistic map guided bi-directional recurrent UNet.

Pancreas segmentation in medical imaging is of great significance for clinical pancreas diagnostics and treatment. However, the large population variations in the pancreas shape and volume cause enormous segmentation difficulties, even for state-of-the-art algorithms utilizing fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs). Specifically, pancreas segmentation suffers from the loss of statement temporal information in 2D methods, and the high computational cost of 3D methods.

Optimized design of the light source for an indoor visible light communication system based on an improved bat algorithm.

Aiming at the problem of uneven distribution of receiving illuminance and optical power on the receiving plane of the visible light communication (VLC) system, this paper proposes a light source optimization method based on an improved bat algorithm (IBA). Taking the rectangular and hybrid layouts with 16 light-emitting diodes (LEDs), as examples, we set the variance of received light power on the receiving plane as the fitness function. By redesigning the speed update method and local search method of the traditional bat algorithm (BA), the IBA is used to optimize the LED half-power angle and LED position that affect the system performance.

miR-150 regulates glucose utilization through targeting GLUT4 in insulin-resistant cardiomyocytes.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in cardiac function and metabolism. However, whether they regulate insulin resistance (IR) of cardiomyocytes remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to shed light on this issue with a focus on miR-150.

Clinical application and mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine in treatment of lung cancer.

Lung cancer is a malignant tumor characterized by a rapid proliferation rate, less survivability, high mortality, and metastatic potential. This review focuses on updated research about the clinical application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as an adjuvant therapy to lung cancer treatment and the mechanisms of TCM effect on lung cancer in vitro and in vivo. We summarized the recent 5 years of different research progress on clinical applications and antitumor mechanisms of TCM in the treatment of lung cancer.