Emerging Role of Macrophage-Fibroblast Interactions in Cardiac Homeostasis and Remodeling.

As major noncardiomyocyte components in cardiac tissues, macrophages and fibroblasts play crucial roles in maintaining cardiac homeostasis, orchestrating reparative responses after cardiac injuries, facilitating adaptive cardiac remodeling, and contributing to adverse cardiac remodeling, owing to their inherent heterogeneity and plasticity. Recent advances in research methods have yielded novel insights into the intricate interactions between macrophages and fibroblasts in the cardiac context. This review aims to comprehensively examine the molecular mechanisms governing macrophage-fibroblast interactions in cardiac homeostasis and remodeling, emphasize recent advancements in the field, and offer an evaluation from a translational standpoint.

MRI-assessed Dynamic Hyperinflation Induced by Tachypnea in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: The SPIROMICS-HF Study.

Purpose To assess the repeatability of real-time cine pulmonary MRI measures of metronome-paced tachypnea (MPT)-induced dynamic hyperinflation and its relationship with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) severity. Materials and Methods SubPopulations and InteRmediate Outcome Measures In COPD Study (SPIROMICS) (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier no.

Thymic stromal lymphopoietin modulates T cell response and improves cardiac repair post-myocardial infarction.

Background: The inflammatory response is associated with cardiac repair and ventricular remodeling after myocardial infarction (MI). The key inflammation regulatory factor thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) plays a critical role in various diseases. However, its role in cardiac repair after MI remains uncertain.

MAPSeg: Unified Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Heterogeneous Medical Image Segmentation Based on 3D Masked Autoencoding and Pseudo-Labeling.

Robust segmentation is critical for deriving quantitative measures from large-scale, multi-center, and longitudinal medical scans. Manually annotating medical scans, however, is expensive and labor-intensive and may not always be available in every domain. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a well-studied technique that alleviates this label-scarcity problem by leveraging available labels from another domain.

ROBUST QUANTIFICATION OF PERCENT EMPHYSEMA ON CT VIA DOMAIN ATTENTION: THE MULTI-ETHNIC STUDY OF ATHEROSCLEROSIS (MESA) LUNG STUDY.

Robust quantification of pulmonary emphysema on computed tomography (CT) remains challenging for large-scale research studies that involve scans from different scanner types and for translation to clinical scans. Although the domain shifts in different CT scanners are subtle compared to shifts existing in other modalities (e.g.

Event-related prefrontal activations during online video game playing are modulated by game mechanics, physiological arousal and the amount of daily playing.

There is a trend to study human brain functions in ecological contexts and in relation to human factors. In this study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to record real-time prefrontal activities in 42 male university student habitual video game players when they played a round of multiplayer online battle arena game, League of Legends. A content-based event coding approach was used to analyze regional activations in relation to event type, physiological arousal indexed by heart rate (HR) change, and individual characteristics of the player.

A functional mechanism for a non-coding variant near AGTR2 associated with risk for preterm birth.

Background: Preterm birth (PTB), defined as delivery before 37 gestational weeks, imposes significant public health burdens. A recent maternal genome-wide association study of spontaneous PTB identified a noncoding locus near the angiotensin II receptor type 2 (AGTR2) gene. Genotype-Tissue Expression data revealed that alleles associated with decreased AGTR2 expression in the uterus were linked to an increased risk of PTB and shortened gestational duration.

T lymphocyte characteristics and immune repertoires in the epicardial adipose tissue of heart failure patients.

Background: Epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) acts as an active immune organ and plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of heart failure (HF). However, the characteristics of immune cells in EAT of HF patients have rarely been elucidated.

Methods: To identify key immune cells in EAT, an integrated bioinformatics analysis was performed on public datasets.

Brillouin frequency shift error estimation formula for distributed optical fiber sensing technology based on Brillouin scattering.

In this work, the problems in the existing Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) error estimation formulas for distributed optical fiber sensing technology based on Brillouin scattering are discussed. Based on the analysis, a new, to the best of our knowledge, BFS error estimation formula is proposed. To validate the proposed formula, a large number of Brillouin spectra with different frequency sweep spans, signal-to-noise ratios, linewidths, and frequency steps are numerically generated, and at the same time, Brillouin spectra with different values of incident light pulse widths and frequency sweep spans are measured with a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer.

Mapping Alveolar Oxygen Partial Pressure in COPD Using Hyperpolarized Helium-3: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) COPD Study.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and emphysema are characterized by functional and structural damage which increases the spaces for gaseous diffusion and impairs oxygen exchange. Here we explore the potential for hyperpolarized (HP) 3He MRI to characterize lung structure and function in a large-scale population-based study. Participants (n = 54) from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) COPD Study, a nested case-control study of COPD among participants with 10+ packyears underwent HP 3He MRI measuring pAO2, apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), and ventilation.

Quantification of lung ventilation defects on hyperpolarized MRI: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) COPD study.

Purpose: To develop an end-to-end deep learning (DL) framework to segment ventilation defects on pulmonary hyperpolarized MRI.

Materials And Methods: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) study is a nested longitudinal case-control study in older smokers. Between February 2016 and July 2017, 56 participants (age, mean ± SD, 74 ± 8 years; 34 men) underwent same breath-hold proton (H) and helium (He) MRI, which were annotated for non-ventilated, hypo-ventilated, and normal-ventilated lungs.

ID-Seg: an infant deep learning-based segmentation framework to improve limbic structure estimates.

Infant brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a promising approach for studying early neurodevelopment. However, segmenting small regions such as limbic structures is challenging due to their low inter-regional contrast and high curvature. MRI studies of the adult brain have successfully applied deep learning techniques to segment limbic structures, and similar deep learning models are being leveraged for infant studies.

PTNet3D: A 3D High-Resolution Longitudinal Infant Brain MRI Synthesizer Based on Transformers.

An increased interest in longitudinal neurodevelopment during the first few years after birth has emerged in recent years. Noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide crucial information about the development of brain structures in the early months of life. Despite the success of MRI collections and analysis for adults, it remains a challenge for researchers to collect high-quality multimodal MRIs from developing infant brains because of their irregular sleep pattern, limited attention, inability to follow instructions to stay still during scanning.

Automated Multiclass Artifact Detection in Diffusion MRI Volumes 3D Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation Convolutional Neural Networks.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is widely used to investigate neuronal and structural development of brain. dMRI data is often contaminated with various types of artifacts. Hence, artifact type identification in dMRI volumes is an essential pre-processing step prior to carrying out any further analysis.

Fully transformer network for skin lesion analysis.

Automatic skin lesion analysis in terms of skin lesion segmentation and disease classification is of great importance. However, these two tasks are challenging as skin lesion images of multi-ethnic population are collected using various scanners in multiple international medical institutes. To address them, most recent works adopt convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for skin lesion analysis.

Automatic Volumetric Quality Assessment of Diffusion MR Images via Convolutional Neural Network Classifiers.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is widely used to find brain biomarkers for various stages of brain structural and neuronal development. Processing DTI data requires a detailed Quality Assessment (QA) to detect artifactual volumes amongst a large pool of data. Since large cohorts of brain DTI data are often used in different studies, manual QA of such images is very labor-intensive.

Bioinformatics and Immune Infiltration Analyses Reveal the Key Pathway and Immune Cells in the Pathogenesis of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.

This study was designed to identify the key pathway and immune cells for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) via bioinformatics analyses of public datasets and evaluate the significance of immune infiltration in the pathogenesis of HCM. Expressional profiling from two public datasets (GSE36961 and GSE141910) of human HCM and healthy control cardiac tissues was obtained from the GEO database. After data preprocessing, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were then screened between HCM and healthy control cardiac tissues in parallel.

Baby's best Foe-riend: Endogenous retroviruses and the evolution of eutherian reproduction.

High maternal investment in pregnancy and the perinatal period are prominent features of eutherian reproduction. Viviparity increases offspring survival, favoring high maternal prenatal investment. Matrotrophy through the placenta reduces maternal investment at early pregnancy, allowing the mother to abort embryos of subpar quality, therefore reducing resources wastage.

A double-stranded DNA catalyzed strand displacement system for detection of small genetic variations.

A double-stranded DNA catalyzed strand displacement system (dsCSD) was established for the detection of small genetic variations, which showed greatly enhanced specificity compared to the conventional single-stranded DNA catalyzed strand displacement (ssCSD) system. The system achieved limits of detection (LODs) of 0.05% and 0.

Eutherian-Specific Gene TRIML2 Attenuates Inflammation in the Evolution of Placentation.

Evolution of highly invasive placentation in the stem lineage of eutherians and subsequent extension of pregnancy set eutherians apart from other mammals, that is, marsupials with short-lived placentas, and oviparous monotremes. Recent studies suggest that eutherian implantation evolved from marsupial attachment reaction, an inflammatory process induced by the direct contact of fetal placenta with maternal endometrium after the breakdown of the shell coat, and shortly before the onset of parturition. Unique to eutherians, a dramatic downregulation of inflammation after implantation prevents the onset of premature parturition, and is critical for the maintenance of gestation.

Anthropoid primate-specific retroviral element THE1B controls expression of CRH in placenta and alters gestation length.

Pregnancy and parturition are intricately regulated to ensure successful reproductive outcomes. However, the factors that control gestational length in humans and other anthropoid primates remain poorly defined. Here, we show the endogenous retroviral long terminal repeat transposon-like human element 1B (THE1B) selectively controls placental expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) that, in turn, influences gestational length and birth timing.