The anti-cancer activity of Dioscin: an update and future perspective.

Natural drugs have the advantages of multi-pathway, multi-target, low toxicity, and high efficiency, which make them widely used and effective in anti-tumor therapy. Dioscin is a steroidal saponin compound that can be extracted from Dioscaceae plants. In recent years, it has been found that Dioscin has potent anti-tumor effects, can inhibit tumor cell proliferation, induce apoptosis and autophagy, inhibits tumor cell metastasis, reverses multidrug resistance, and increases sensitivity to anticancer drugs, and thus inhibit tumor progression.

Imaging cerebral blood flow through the intact rat skull with temporal laser speckle imaging.

We discovered that laser speckle temporal contrast analysis (LSTCA) is able to access the two-dimensional (2D) cerebral blood flow velocity and vessel structure through the intact rat skull. It is demonstrated that LSTCA can significantly suppress the influence of the laser speckle from the stationary structure, such as the skull, and thus reveal the blood flow and morphology of blood vessels through the laser speckle images recorded from the intact rat skull.