Open ultrawidefield fundus image dataset with disease diagnosis and clinical image quality assessment.

Ultrawidefield fundus (UWF) images have a wide imaging range (200° of the retinal region), which offers the opportunity to show more information for ophthalmic diseases. Image quality assessment (IQA) is a prerequisite for applying UWF and is crucial for developing artificial intelligence-driven diagnosis and screening systems. Most image quality systems have been applied to the assessments of natural images, but whether these systems are suitable for evaluating the UWF image quality remains debatable.

NitraTh epitope-based neoantigen vaccines for effective tumor immunotherapy.

Neoantigen vaccines represent an emerging and promising strategy in the field of tumor immunotherapy. Despite their potential, designing an effective neoantigen vaccine remains a challenge due to the current limitations in predicting CD4 T cell epitopes with high accuracy. Here, we introduce a novel approach to neoantigen vaccine design that does not rely on computational prediction of CD4 T cell epitopes.

MLS-Net: An Automatic Sleep Stage Classifier Utilizing Multimodal Physiological Signals in Mice.

Over the past decades, feature-based statistical machine learning and deep neural networks have been extensively utilized for automatic sleep stage classification (ASSC). Feature-based approaches offer clear insights into sleep characteristics and require low computational power but often fail to capture the spatial-temporal context of the data. In contrast, deep neural networks can process raw sleep signals directly and deliver superior performance.

Protopanaxadiol derivative: A plant origin of novel selective glucocorticoid receptor modulator with anti-inflammatory effect.

Constant efforts have been made to move towards maintaining the positive anti-inflammatory functions of glucocorticoids (GCs) while minimizing side effects. The anti-inflammatory effect of GCs is mainly attributed to the inhibition of major inflammatory pathways such as NF-κB through GR transrepression, while its side effects are mainly mediated by transactivation. Here, we investigated the selective glucocorticoid receptor modulator (SGRM)-like properties of a plant-derived compound.

Ocular Disease Detection with Deep Learning (Fine-Grained Image Categorization) Applied to Ocular B-Scan Ultrasound Images.

Introduction: The aim of this work is to develop a deep learning (DL) system for rapidly and accurately screening for intraocular tumor (IOT), retinal detachment (RD), vitreous hemorrhage (VH), and posterior scleral staphyloma (PSS) using ocular B-scan ultrasound images.

Methods: Ultrasound images from five clinically confirmed categories, including vitreous hemorrhage, retinal detachment, intraocular tumor, posterior scleral staphyloma, and normal eyes, were used to develop and evaluate a fine-grained classification system (the Dual-Path Lesion Attention Network, DPLA-Net). Images were derived from five centers scanned by different sonographers and divided into training, validation, and test sets in a ratio of 7:1:2.

Reduced Retinal Vascular Density and Skeleton Length in Amblyopia.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the possible relationship between retinal vascular abnormalities and amblyopia by analyzing vascular structures of fundus images.

Methods: In this observational study, retinal fundus images were collected from 36 patients with unilateral amblyopia, 33 patients with bilateral amblyopia, and 36 healthy control volunteers. We developed a customized training algorithm based on U-Net to digitalize the vasculature in the fundus images to quantify vascular density (area and fractal dimension), skeleton length, and number of bifurcation points.

General room-temperature Suzuki-Miyaura polymerization for organic electronics.

π-Conjugated polymers (CPs) have broad applications in high-performance optoelectronics, energy storage, sensors and biomedicine. However, developing green and efficient methods to precisely synthesize alternating CP structures on a large scale remains challenging and critical for their industrialization. Here a room-temperature, scalable and homogeneous Suzuki-Miyaura-type polymerization reaction is developed with broad generality validated for 24 CPs including donor-donor, donor-acceptor and acceptor-acceptor connectivities, yielding device-quality polymers with high molecular masses.

Design and synthesis of novel hederagonic acid analogs as potent anti-inflammatory compounds capable of protecting against LPS-induced acute lung injury.

Acute lung injury (ALI) presents a significant clinical challenge due to its high mortality rates and the lack of effective treatment strategies. The most effective approaches to treating ALI include disrupting inflammatory cascades and associated inflammatory damage within the lung. Hederagenin was utilized as a core skeleton to design and synthesize 33 hederagonic acid derivatives.

Advances in the anti-tumor potential of hederagenin and its analogs.

Hederagenin is a pentacyclic triterpenoid that is widely distributed as the main pharmaceutical ingredient in various medicinal plants. Similarly as other pentacyclic triterpenoids, hederagenin has various pharmacological effects such as anti-tumor, anti-inflammatory, anti-depressant, and anti-viral activities. In particular, the anti-tumor activity of hederagenin indicates its potential for development into highly effective chemotherapeutic agents.

Characterization of a chlorine resistant and hydrophilic TiO/calcium alginate hydrogel filtration membrane used for protein purification maintaining protein structure.

The development of membranes for protein purification has stringent requirement of disinfection resistance, low protein adsorption and anti-fouling, without changing protein structure. In this study, hydrophilic titanium dioxide (TiO)/calcium alginate (TiO/CaAlg) hydrogel membranes were prepared by a simple ionic cross-linking method. The effects of the porogenic agent polyethylene glycol (PEG) concentration, the molecular weight of PEG, and the concentration of TiO on the filtration properties were systematically investigated.

Room Temperature Anhydrous Suzuki-Miyaura Polymerization Enabled by C-S Bond Activation.

The Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling is one of the most important and powerful methods for constructing C-C bonds. However, the protodeboronation of arylboronic acids hinder the development of Suzuki-Miyaura coupling in the precise synthesis of conjugated polymers (CPs). Here, an anhydrous room temperature Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction between (hetero)aryl boronic esters and aryl sulfides was explored, of which universality was exemplified by thirty small molecules and twelve CPs.

Enhanced Readout from Spatial Interference Fringes in a Point-Source Cold Atom Inertial Sensor.

When the initial size of an atom cloud in a cold atom interferometer is negligible compared to its size after free expansion, the interferometer is approximated to a point-source interferometer and is sensitive to rotational movements by introducing an additional phase shear in the interference sequence. This sensitivity on rotation enables a vertical atom-fountain interferometer to measure angular velocity in addition to gravitational acceleration, which it is conventionally used to measure. The accuracy and precision of the angular velocity measurement depends on proper extraction of frequency and phase from spatial interference patterns detected via the imaging of the atom cloud, which is usually affected by various systematic biases and noise.

Spatial filtering of Zeeman sub-states in an atomic fountain.

In an atomic fountain, atoms in motion can be spatially separated into discrete Zeeman sub-states by magnetically induced Stern-Gerlach effect. With resonant light pulses acting as a shutter, specific states are selected for subsequent experiments. Such separation-selection process in atomic optics is the analogue of a spatial filter in physical optics which selects and purifies the modes of light.

Metabolomics and Network Pharmacology-Based Investigation into the Mechanisms Underlying the Therapeutic Effect of a New Chinese Traditional Medicine (Cui Nai Ling) on Bromocriptine-Induced Hypogalactia.

As a traditional veterinary medicine to promote lactation, Cui Nai Ling (CNL) can not only increase milk supply and promote health but also improve the overall physiological function and immunity of the animals. In order to further improve CNL's effect on lactation, we have previously made a new CNL (NCNL) by adding Tetrapanacis Medulla and replacing Vaccariae Semen with fried Vaccariae Semen in CNL. We have demonstrated that the lactation-promoting effect of NCNL is better than that of CNL.

Altered spontaneous calcium signaling of in situ chondrocytes in human osteoarthritic cartilage.

Intracellular calcium ([Ca]) signaling is an essential universal secondary messenger in articular chondrocytes. However, little is known about its spatiotemporal features in the context of osteoarthritis (OA). Herein, by examining the cartilage samples collected from patients undergoing knee arthroscopic surgery, we investigated the spatiotemporal features of spontaneous [Ca] signaling in in situ chondrocytes at different OA stages.

EmDL: Extracting miRNA-Drug Interactions from Literature.

The microRNAs (miRNAs), regulators of post-transcriptional processes, have been found to affect the efficacy of drugs by regulating the biological processes in which the target proteins of drugs may be involved. For example, some drugs develop resistance when certain miRNAs are overexpressed. Therefore, identifying miRNAs that affect drug effects can help understand the mechanisms of drug actions and design more efficient drugs.

GEAR: A database of Genomic Elements Associated with drug Resistance.

Drug resistance is becoming a serious problem that leads to the failure of standard treatments, which is generally developed because of genetic mutations of certain molecules. Here, we present GEAR (A database of Genomic Elements Associated with drug Resistance) that aims to provide comprehensive information about genomic elements (including genes, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and microRNAs) that are responsible for drug resistance. Right now, GEAR contains 1631 associations between 201 human drugs and 758 genes, 106 associations between 29 human drugs and 66 miRNAs, and 44 associations between 17 human drugs and 22 SNPs.

[Indirect coculture of human infrapatellar fat pad-derived stem cells with osteoarthritic chondrocytes induces their chondrogenesis].

Objective: To promote phenotype recovery of osteoarthritic articular chondrocytes( OACs) and induce chondrogenic differentiation of infrapatellar fat pad-derived stem cells( IPFPSCs) by indirectly coculturing these two types of cells.

Methods: The OACs and IPFPSCs were isolated and cultured in vitro. This experiment included single IPFPSCs group,single OACs group,and coculture group.

[Research on Diagnosis Algorithm of Parkinson’s Disease Based on Speech Sample Multi-edit and Random Forest].

Parkinson’s disease(PD)diagnosis based on speech data has been proved to be an effective way in recent years.There are still some problems on preprocessing samples,ensemble learning,and so on.The problems can further cause misleading of classifiers,unsatisfactory classification accuracy and stability.

[Study on single-walled carbon nanotube thin film photoelectric device].

The single-walled carbon nanotube film photoelectric device was invented, and it can generate net photocurrent under bias voltage when it is illuminated by the laser. The influences of bias voltage, laser power and illuminating position on the net photocurrent were investigated. The experimental results showed that when the center of the film was illuminated, the photocurrent increased with the applied bias, but tended to saturate as the laser power increased.

Study on modification of single-walled carbon nanotubes on the surface of monocrystalline silicon solar cells.

Modification of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) on the surface of monocrystalline silicon solar cells was investigated. The modification was realized by dropping a well-distributed mixture of SWNTs and ethanol with different dosages on the surface of monocrystalline silicon solar cells in the same effective area. The experimental results showed that the increasing rates of conversion efficiency, short-circuit current, and fill factor were 4.