Genetically predicted inflammatory proteins mediate the association between gut microbiota and renal cell carcinoma.

Background: Studies have indicated a potential relationship between gut microbiota and renal cell carcinoma. However, the causal relationship between various types of gut microbiota and renal cell carcinoma, as well as the role of inflammatory protein as mediators, remains unclear.

Methods: This study aimed to identify the relationship between gut microbiota, inflammatory protein, and renal cell cancer through a large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) utilizing pooled data.

Exploring causal relationship between the lipids, immune cells, and leiomyosarcoma: A Mendelian randomization and mediation analysis.

This study aimed to delineate the causal nexus between lipids and leiomyosarcoma (LMS), with a particular emphasis on delineating the mediating role of immune cells. Employing a 2-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) framework, we scrutinized the potential association of 179 lipid species with LMS across 179 cases and 314,193 controls. The analysis was underpinned by summary-level data derived from genome-wide association studies.

Association between immune cells and endometrial cancer: A bidirectional Mendelian randomization study.

Background: The prognostic significance of tumor-infiltrating immune cells in endometrial cancer is a subject of ongoing debate. Recent evidence increasingly suggests that these immune cells and cytokines, abundant in endometrial cancer tissues, play a pivotal role in stimulating the body inherent anti-tumor immune responses.

Methods: Leveraging publicly accessible genetic data, we conducted an exhaustive 2-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study.

The causal effects of immune cells on pancreatic cancer: A 2‑sample Mendelian randomization study.

Leveraging publicly available genetic datasets, we conducted a comprehensive 2-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to explore the causal links between 731 immunophenotypes and the risk of pancreatic cancer (PC). To ensure the robustness of our findings, extensive sensitivity analyses were performed, evaluating stability, heterogeneity, and potential horizontal pleiotropy. Our analysis pinpointed 24 immunophenotypes significantly associated with the risk of PC.

Emodin ameliorates myocardial fibrosis in mice by inactivating the ROS/PI3K/Akt/mTOR axis.

Background: Emodin is a traditional medicine that has been shown to exert anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects. Previous research has indicated that emodin can alleviate myocardial remodeling and inhibit myocardial hypertrophy and fibrosis. However, the mechanism by which emodin affects myocardial fibrosis (MF) has not yet been elucidated.

Achieving efficient interpretability of reinforcement learning via policy distillation and selective input gradient regularization.

Although deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven successful in a wide range of tasks, one challenge it faces is interpretability when applied to real-world problems. Saliency maps are frequently used to provide interpretability for deep neural networks. However, in the RL domain, existing saliency map approaches are either computationally expensive and thus cannot satisfy the real-time requirement of real-world scenarios or cannot produce interpretable saliency maps for RL policies.

Radiomics in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common head and neck malignancies, and the primary treatment methods are radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Radiotherapy alone, concurrent chemoradiotherapy, and induction chemotherapy combined with concurrent chemoradiotherapy can be used according to different grades. Treatment options and prognoses vary greatly depending on the grade of disease in the patients.

Neurorobots as a Means Toward Neuroethology and Explainable AI.

Understanding why deep neural networks and machine learning algorithms act as they do is a difficult endeavor. Neuroscientists are faced with similar problems. One way biologists address this issue is by closely observing behavior while recording neurons or manipulating brain circuits.

Neuromodulated attention and goal-driven perception in uncertain domains.

In uncertain domains, the goals are often unknown and need to be predicted by the organism or system. In this paper, contrastive Excitation Backprop (c-EB) was used in two goal-driven perception tasks - one with pairs of noisy MNIST digits and the other with a robot in an action-based attention scenario. The first task included attending to even, odd, low, and high digits, whereas the second task included action goals, such as "eat", "work-on-computer", "read", and "say-hi" that led to attention to objects associated with those actions.