Publications by authors named "Kou W"

Background: Acquired resistance to epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR TKIs) remains a significant hurdle for patients with EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), particularly those lacking the EGFR. IMpower 150 study demonstrated promising efficacy for a combination of immune-chemotherapy and bevacizumab in patients with EGFR-mutated NSCLC.

Methods: This open-label, single-arm, phase II trial evaluated the efficacy and immune cell profile of the modified regimen combining atezolizumab, bevacizumab (7.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fibrosis is the outcome of any abnormal tissue repair process that results in normal tissue replacement with scar tissue, leading to persistent tissue damage and cellular injury. During the process of fibrosis, many cytokines and chemokines are involved, and their activities are controlled by post-translational modifications, especially SUMOylation and NEDDylation. Both these modifications entail a three-step process of activation, conjugation, and ligation that involves three kinds of enzymes, namely, E1 activating, E2 conjugating, and E3 ligase enzymes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The functional lumen imaging probe (FLIP) has proven to be a versatile device for diagnosing esophageal motility disorders and estimating esophageal wall compliance, but there is a lack of viable software for quantitative assessment of FLIP measurements.

Methods: A Python-based web framework was developed for a unified assessment of FLIP measurements including clinical metrics such as esophagogastric junction (EGJ) distensibility index (DI), maximum EGJ opening diameter, mechanics-based metrics for estimating strength, and effectiveness of contractions, such as contraction power and displaced volume, and machine learning-based clustering and predictive algorithms such as the virtual disease landscape (VDL) and EGJ obstruction probability. The clinical and VDL probability metrics were then validated using FLIP data from 121 subjects constituting different categories of EGJ opening which were diagnosed by expert clinicians.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Aging is a pressing global concern and is frequently accompanied by the emergence of many chronic diseases. Xiyangshen Sanqi Danshen granules (XSD) have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-fatigue functions, but the mechanism of their anti-aging effects is not clear.

Methods: This study elucidated the anti-aging mechanism and potentially active ingredients of XSD by performing transcriptomic analysis and network pharmacological analysis in a D-galactose (D-gal)-induced C57BL/6J mouse aging model.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Dysregulation of chondrogenic differentiation is associated with osteoarthritis (OA). The myokine irisin is beneficial in OA treatment; yet, the underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) act as important regulators of chondrocyte differentiation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Ginsenoside from Panax notoginseng has higher content and potential as a skin whitening agent compared to Panax ginseng, with research focusing on its effectiveness in inhibiting melanin production.* -
  • The study utilized zebrafish embryos and B16 cells to identify potent ginsenosides, specifically protopanaxtriol saponins (PTS), which showed strong inhibition of the enzyme tyrosinase, linked to melanin synthesis.* -
  • PTS was successfully formulated into a gel using ethosomes, proving effective in reducing UVB-induced tanning in mice, suggesting its potential for safe skin whitening applications.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Somatic variations in 'Fuji' apple can lead to beneficial bud sports, which are key for breeding new apple traits.
  • A complete genome assembly of 'Fuji' has revealed multiple independent origins of spur-type and early-maturing traits among its clones.
  • The study identifies specific genetic changes, such as a deletion in the MdTCP11 gene, that influence growth characteristics and offer insight for future apple breeding efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Four-dimensional high-resolution impedance manometry (4D HRM) uses impedance to estimate esophageal luminal cross-sectional area and track nadir impedance to measure intrabolus pressure (IBP). We aimed to determine whether 4D HRM metrics could define abnormal esophagogastric junction (EGJ) opening between Chicago Classification version 4.0 motility disorders and compare 4D HRM with functional lumen imaging probe (FLIP) metrics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Superionic conductor-based solid-state electrolytes with preferred crystal structures hold great promise for realizing ultrafast lithium-ion (Li) transfer, which is urgently desired for all-solid-state lithium batteries. However, the precise control of crystal growth of superionic conductors is still challenging since the crystals always spontaneously grow to disordered structures with the lowest internal energy to ensure thermodynamic stability. Herein, a coaxial nanowire with a polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) sheath and a LiLaTiO (LLTO) precursor core (PVP/LLTO-caNW) is prepared through coaxial electrospinning, followed by sintering into LLTO nanowire with an oriented crystal structure (LLTO-caNW).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Previous research demonstrated the effects of Sorbaria sorbifolia (SS) in combating hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Despite SS's proven efficacy in treating HCC, the precise bioactive constituents contributing to its therapeutic benefits, along with the mechanisms behind them, warrant further exploration.

Purpose: The objective of our study was to illuminate the possible elements, targets, and modulatory pathways employed by specific bioactive components in SS for HCC treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is considered as the strongest predictor of Parkinson's disease (PD). Reliable and accurate biomarkers for iRBD detection and the prediction of phenoconversion are in urgent need. This study aimed to investigate whether α-Synuclein (α-Syn) species in plasma neuron-derived extracellular vesicles (NDEVs) could differentiate between iRBD patients and healthy controls (HCs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Radioresistance is a major obstacle for the therapy of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and lead to a poor prognosis. Ferroptosis is supposed to be responsible for radioresistance. However, the ferroptosis-induced radioresistance in ESCC and its related regulatory mechanisms are not yet fully understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with later cognitive decline. However, the mechanisms underlying the effects of different types of ACEs are unclear. This study examined how ACEs impact cognitive function, specifically deprivation-related ACEs (DrACEs) and threat-related ACEs (TrACEs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The accurate segmentation of prostate cancer (PCa) from multiparametric MRI is crucial in clinical practice for guiding biopsy and treatment planning. Existing automated methods often lack the necessary accuracy and robustness in localizing PCa, whereas interactive segmentation methods, although more accurate, require user intervention on each input image, thereby limiting the cost-effectiveness of the segmentation workflow. Our innovative framework addresses the limitations of current methods by combining a coarse segmentation network, a rejection network, and an interactive deep network known as Segment Anything Model (SAM).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Precision dosing is essential in improving drug efficacy and minimizing adverse reactions, especially in liver impaired patients. However, there is no objective index to directly evaluate the body's ability to metabolize specific drugs. Many factors affect the activity of enzymes, and alter the systemic exposure of substrate drugs, like genetic polymorphism, drug-drug interactions and physiological/pathological state.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The segmentation of prostatic zones from MRI is crucial for improving prostate cancer diagnosis due to the differing characteristics of lesions in the peripheral zone (PZ) and central gland (CG).
  • The boundary-aware semantic clustering network (BASC-Net) enhances segmentation accuracy by focusing on features near the prostate zonal boundaries, using a self-attention mechanism and a loss function that improves feature similarity within zones while distinguishing between different zones.
  • Evaluation on NCI-ISBI 2013 and Prostate158 datasets showed BASC-Net significantly outperformed existing methods, achieving high Dice similarity coefficients and demonstrating its effectiveness in facilitating prostate lesion detection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Dyslipidemia is increasingly recognized as an essential risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. However, few studies illustrated the effects of ambient temperature exposure (TE) on lipid levels in children. The study aimed to examine the association between ambient TE and lipid levels in children.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) is a serious disease of the central nervous system. Aside from the limited intrinsic regenerative capacity of neurons, complex microenvironmental disturbances can also lead to further cellular damage and growth inhibition. Programmed cell death regulated by pyroptosis has an important role in the pathogenesis of SCI.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Yuxi, located in China's central plateau of Yunnan, is grappling with ecological and environmental challenges as it continues to develop its economy. While ecological quality assessment serves as the foundation for ecological protection, it is pivotal to have reliable and long-term methods for assessing the ecological status to support informed decision-making in ecological protection. Reliable and long-term methods for assessing ecological status in order to facilitate informed decision-making in ecological protection are applied.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Esophageal motility disorders can be diagnosed by either high-resolution manometry (HRM) or the functional lumen imaging probe (FLIP) but there is no systematic approach to synergize the measurements of these modalities or to improve the diagnostic metrics that have been developed to analyze them. This work aimed to devise a formal approach to bridge the gap between diagnoses inferred from HRM and FLIP measurements using deep learning and mechanics.

Methods: The "mechanical health" of the esophagus was analyzed in 740 subjects including a spectrum of motility disorder patients and normal subjects.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Predicting hypoglycemia while maintaining a low false alarm rate is a challenge for the wide adoption of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices in diabetes management. One small study suggested that a deep learning model based on the long short-term memory (LSTM) network had better performance in hypoglycemia prediction than traditional machine learning algorithms in European patients with type 1 diabetes. However, given that many well-recognized deep learning models perform poorly outside the training setting, it remains unclear whether the LSTM model could be generalized to different populations or patients with other diabetes subtypes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Early diagnosis of α-synucleinopathies like Parkinson's disease is difficult but important.
  • Researchers created a specialized test to analyze microRNA in extracellular vesicles from blood plasma, studying over 1200 participants, including healthy individuals and those with sleep disorders or other related conditions.
  • Findings showed elevated levels of a specific microRNA (miR-44438) in patients with α-synucleinopathies, which could help in early detection and tracking disease progression over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Evidence of abnormal α-synuclein (α-Syn) deposition in the brain is required for definitive diagnosis of synucleinopathies, which remains challenging. The seed amplification assay (SAA) is an innovative technique that can detect the seeding activity of misfolded α-Syn, enabling the amplification and detection of minute quantities of pathogenic α-Syn aggregates. This study aimed to evaluate oral mucosa α-Syn SAA as possible diagnostic and prodromal biomarkers for synucleinopathies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF