Publications by authors named "K Niu"

Purpose: Deep learning is a promising approach to increase reproducibility and time-efficiency of GTV delineation in head and neck cancer, but model evaluation primarily relies on manual GTV delineations as reference annotation, which are subjective and tend to overestimate tumor volume. This study aimed to validate a deep learning model for laryngeal and hypopharyngeal GTV segmentation with pathology and to compare its performance with clinicians' manual delineations.

Materials And Methods: A retrospective dataset of 193 laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer patients was used to train a deep learning model with clinical GTV delineations as reference.

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Chronic neuroinflammation with sustained microglial activation occurs in Parkinson's disease (PD), yet the mechanisms and exact contribution of these cells to the neurodegeneration remains poorly understood. In this study, we induced progressive dopaminergic neuron loss in mice via rAAV-hSYN injection to cause the neuronal expression of α-synuclein, which produced neuroinflammation and behavioral alterations. We administered PLX5622, a colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor inhibitor, for 3 weeks prior to rAAV-hSYN injection, maintaining it for 8 weeks to eliminate microglia.

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Background: Sarcopenia is an age-related, progressive, and systemic skeletal muscle disorder that can lead to numerous adverse outcomes. Animal studies have shown that sesame can enhance skeletal muscle blood flow and improve physical performance. However, no studies have yet explored the association between sesame consumption and the incidence of sarcopenia in the general population.

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Lactate-mediated lactylation on target proteins is recently identified as the novel posttranslational modification with profound biological functions. RNA 5-methylcytosine (mC) modification possesses dynamic and reversible nature, suggesting that activity of its methyltransferase NSUN2 is actively regulated. However, how NSUN2 activity is response to acidic condition in tumor microenvironment and then regulates cancer cell survival remain to be clarified.

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Analyzing microbial samples remains computationally challenging due to their diversity and complexity. The lack of robust de novo protein function prediction methods exacerbates the difficulty in deriving functional insights from these samples. Traditional prediction methods, dependent on homology and sequence similarity, often fail to predict functions for novel proteins and proteins without known homologs.

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