Doxorubicin-induced reactive oxygen species generation and intracellular Ca2+ increase are reciprocally modulated in rat cardiomyocytes.

Doxorubicin (DOX) is one of the most potent anticancer drugs and induces acute cardiac arrhythmias and chronic cumulative cardiomyopathy. Though DOX-induced cardiotoxicity is known to be caused mainly by ROS generation, a disturbance of Ca2+ homeostasis is also implicated one of the cardiotoxic mechanisms. In this study, a molecular basis of DOX-induced modulation of intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) was investigated.

Glutamine inhibits lipopolysaccharide-induced cytoplasmic phospholipase A2 activation and protects against endotoxin shock in mouse.

Glutamine (Gln) supplementation is known to play a beneficial role in a number of settings of critical illness as well as laboratory models of endotoxin shock. We have investigated a molecular mechanism of the protective role of Gln in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced shock using a mouse model. To examine the effectiveness of Gln, Gln was administered before or after LPS injection.

Automatic navigation path generation based on two-phase adaptive region-growing algorithm for virtual angioscopy.

In this paper, we propose a fast and automated navigation path generation algorithm to visualize inside of carotid artery using MR angiography images. The carotid artery is one of the body regions not accessible by real optical probe but can be visualized with virtual endoscopy. By applying two-phase adaptive region-growing algorithm, the carotid artery segmentation is started at the initial seed, which is located on the initially thresholded binary image.