Epigenetic landscape of IL-10 in Graves' disease: site-specific DNA methylation alterations and their associations with immune dysregulation.

Objective: Epigenetic modifications, particularly deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation, regulate the expression of immune-mediated factors. This study aimed to investigate the methylation landscape of the interleukin-10 (IL10) gene in Graves' disease (GD).

Methods: This study quantitatively profiled DNA methylation levels within the IL-10 gene using peripheral blood samples from GD patients and healthy controls.

TPOT: TOPOLOGY PRESERVING OPTIMAL TRANSPORT IN RETINAL FUNDUS IMAGE ENHANCEMENT.

Retinal fundus photography enhancement is important for diagnosing and monitoring retinal diseases. However, early approaches to retinal image enhancement, such as those based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), often struggle to preserve the complex topological information of blood vessels, resulting in spurious or missing vessel structures. The persistence diagram, which captures topological features based on the persistence of topological structures under different filtrations, provides a promising way to represent the structure information.

The relationship between digital literacy and innovative behavior among Chinese medical students: the chain mediating roles of diversity experience and creative self-efficacy.

Background: Innovative behavior and digital literacy are two significant concerns in the cultivation of professional and innovative talents within medical higher education. Although studies suggest that information-related skills positively predict college students' innovative behavior, research on digital literacy remains limited, and the internal mechanisms through which digital literacy influences innovative behavior have not been clearly elucidated, especially among medical students. This study aims to explore the relationship between digital literacy and innovative behavior among Chinese medical students, with diversity experience and creative self-efficacy acting as chain mediators.

Multimodal Variational Autoencoder: A Barycentric View.

Multiple signal modalities, such as vision and sounds, are naturally present in real-world phenomena. Recently, there has been growing interest in learning generative models, in particular variational autoencoder (VAE), for multimodal representation learning especially in the case of missing modalities. The primary goal of these models is to learn a modality-invariant and modality-specific representation that characterizes information across multiple modalities.

PLASMA-CYCLEGAN: PLASMA BIOMARKER-GUIDED MRI TO PET CROSS-MODALITY TRANSLATION USING CONDITIONAL CYCLEGAN.

Cross-modality translation between MRI and PET imaging is challenging due to the distinct mechanisms underlying these modalities. Blood-based biomarkers (BBBMs) are revolutionizing Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection by identifying patients and quantifying brain amyloid levels. However, the potential of BBBMs to enhance PET image synthesis remains unexplored.

Obesity-associated macrophages dictate adipose stem cell ferroptosis and visceral fat dysfunction by propagating mitochondrial fragmentation.

Morbid obesity induces adipose stem cell (ASC) shortage that impairs visceral adipose tissue (VAT) homeostasis. Macrophages cooperate with ASCs to regulate VAT metabolism, their impact on ASC shortage remains elusive. TNF-α-induced protein 8-like 2 (TIPE2) is an important regulator in immune cells, its expression in VAT macrophages and function in macrophage-ASC crosstalk are largely unknown.

Simple and flexible method for measuring the liquid refractive index with an electrically tunable lens.

In the parallel-plate-based method for measuring the liquid refractive index (RI), the parallel light passes sequentially through a convex lens and a parallel plate containing the tested liquid, resulting in axial displacement of the emitted light. By moving the camera, the axial displacement caused by the introduction of the tested liquid can be obtained and used to calculate the liquid RI. To avoid the mechanical adjustment of the system, a simple and flexible method for measuring the liquid RI via an electrically tunable lens (ETL) is proposed.

EVIT-UNET: U-NET LIKE EFFICIENT VISION TRANSFORMER FOR MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION ON MOBILE AND EDGE DEVICES.

With the rapid development of deep learning, CNN-based U-shaped networks have succeeded in medical image segmentation and are widely applied for various tasks. However, their limitations in capturing global features hinder their performance in complex segmentation tasks. The rise of Vision Transformer (ViT) has effectively compensated for this deficiency of CNNs and promoted the application of ViT-based U-networks in medical image segmentation.

Context-Aware Optimal Transport Learning for Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement.

Retinal fundus photography offers a non-invasive way to diagnose and monitor a variety of retinal diseases, but is prone to inherent quality glitches arising from systemic imperfections or operator/patient-related factors. However, high-quality retinal images are crucial for carrying out accurate diagnoses and automated analyses. The fundus image enhancement is typically formulated as a distribution alignment problem, by finding a one-to-one mapping between a low-quality image and its high-quality counterpart.

Quantification of retinotopic maps with a Gaussian process modeling.

Visual neuroscientists use blood oxygenation level-dependent fMRI data to delineate the structure and boundaries of visual-field representations on the human cortex, a process called retinotopic mapping. Although the population receptive field (PRF) model facilitates receptive-field estimation for cortical voxels, retinotopic map quantification still faces challenges. In vivo, retinotopic areas exhibit consistent topology, but modeling this topology is often disrupted by limited resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio.

EKG-AC: A New Paradigm for Process Industrial Optimization Based on Offline Reinforcement Learning With Expert Knowledge Guidance.

Operation optimization plays a crucial role in process control, directly influencing product quality and profitability. Reinforcement learning (RL), with its capabilities in autonomous learning and dynamic adaptability, has become a promising solution in this domain. However, its real-world application is constrained by the high costs and risks associated with its interactions with environments.

Promoting ubiquitin-dependent Drp1 degradation contributes to the protective effect of Astragalin against diabetic renal fibrosis.

Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) is a severe complication of diabetes. Fibrosis is an irreversible pathological change closely associated with the development of disease. Disrupted mitochondrial dynamics involved in the progression of fibrosis.

MRI-Driven Longitudinal Studies of Hippocampal Alterations During the Initial Cognitive Decline.

Based on available magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies, hippocampal alteration is one of the hallmarks during cognitive decline. However, the longitudinal hippocampal morphometric changes during the initial cognitive decline are unclear. Exploring a validated biomarker with high clinical relevance is urgent.

Protocol for Simultaneous EEG and fNIRS Measurement in Characterizing Brain State.

Multi-modal signal measurement is widely used in health monitoring and disease recognition, such as electroencephalography (EEG)-functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), EEG-functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), EEG-electrocardiograph (ECG), etc. The concurrent recording of EEG-fNIRS not only measures concentration changes of oxyhemoglobin (HbO) and deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) of the cortical microcirculation blood vessels but also records electrical activities of the cerebral cortex in a relatively portable setting compared with EEG-fMRI and other patterns. This protocol proposes a standard operating procedure for the joint EEG-fNIRS measurement, including electrode placement, hardware, and software.

Association between hemodialysis and surgical outcomes of pars plana vitrectomy in patients with chronic renal failure and proliferative diabetic retinopathy: a retrospective analysis.

Background: To investigate the association between Hemodialysis (HD) and postoperative outcomes in patients diagnosed with chronic renal failure (CRF) who underwent pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) for proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR).

Methods: This was a retrospective study. Fifty-three eyes were divided into HD (25 eyes) and non-HD (28 eyes) groups.

A global object-oriented dynamic network for low-altitude remote sensing object detection.

With advancements in drone control technology, low-altitude remote sensing image processing holds significant potential for intelligent, real-time urban management. However, achieving high accuracy with deep learning algorithms remains challenging due to the stringent requirements for low computational cost, minimal parameters, and real-time performance. This study introduces the Global Object-Oriented Dynamic Network (GOOD-Net) algorithm, comprising three fundamental components: an object-oriented, dynamically adaptive backbone network; a neck network designed to optimize the utilization of global information; and a task-specific processing head augmented for detailed feature refinement.

Non-Invasive Localization of Epileptogenic Zone in Drug-Resistant Epilepsy Based on Time-Frequency Analysis and VGG Convolutional Neural Network.

The mainstream method for treating drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) is surgical resection of the epileptogenic zone. Non-invasive automatic localization of epileptogenic zone can be used to guide electrode implantation and improve the effectiveness and safety of neurosurgical treatments. Previous researchers have proposed a range of methods for this purpose, but these suffer from limits such as unclear post-operative outcomes, invasiveness, limited data volume, and single DRE type.

Evaluation of testicular function in 1-2-year-old cryptorchid children with alterations of anti-mullerian hormone after various orchidopexy.

Unlabelled: This study assessed testicular function in children with cryptorchidism following different orchidopexy procedures by measuring serum anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH). The aim was to identify clinical factors associated with testicular function recovery by comparing pre- and post-operative levels of AMH, luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), testosterone (T), and testicular volume at various time points. This prospective observational cohort study included children aged 1 to 1.

Efficient Photocatalytic Degradation of Highly Concentrated Perfluorooctanoic Acid by Bi Self-Doped BiMoO.

Bi self-doped BiMoO was synthesized by a solvothermal method. The introduction of Bi enhanced the absorption of visible light by the catalyst, and the Bi could act as an electron transfer site to facilitate the separation of photogenerated carriers and enhance the photocatalytic activity of the catalyst for the degradation of PFOA. The oxidation of PFOA by ·O as the main reactive oxygen species of degradation facilitated its degradation.

Echolocation frequency alteration, and hearing loss induced by an ototoxic drug in the echolocating bat Hipposideros pratti.

Noise exposure increases the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the outer hair cells (OHCs) of the cochlea, which subsequently damages OHCs and causes noise-induced hearing loss. However, increasing evidences have shown that echolocating bats can maintain their auditory sensitivity after intense noise exposure, indicating that they have a strong capacity to clear ROS, or that noise exposure does not increase ROS levels in the cochlea of the animals. To differentiate between these possibilities, the constant frequency-frequency modulation bats, Hipposideros pratti, were intraperitoneally injected with the ototoxic drug Kanamycin, which increases ROS levels in the cochlea of other mammalian species.

nnMobileNet: Rethinking CNN for Retinopathy Research.

Over the past few decades, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been at the forefront of the detection and tracking of various retinal diseases (RD). Despite their success, the emergence of vision transformers (ViT) in the 2020s has shifted the trajectory of RD model development. The leading-edge performance of ViT-based models in RD can be largely credited to their scalability-their ability to improve as more parameters are added.

RBAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Retinal Vessels Branching Angle Detection.

Detecting retinal image analysis, particularly the geometrical features of branching points, plays an essential role in diagnosing eye diseases. However, existing methods used for this purpose often are coarse-level and lack fine-grained analysis for efficient annotation. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a novel method for detecting retinal branching angles using a self-configured image processing technique.

The role and clinical significance of myeloperoxidase (MPO) and TNF-α in prognostic evaluation of T-COPD.

Purpose: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive inflammatory disorder that requires effective biomarkers for assessing disease activity and severity. This study aimed to compare clinical characteristics, inflammatory biomarker levels, and pulmonary function between stable COPD (S-COPD) and treated COPD (T-COPD) patients, with a focus on the prognostic value of inflammatory markers such as TNF-α, MPO, and IL-6.

Methods: A total of 81 patients were enrolled in the study, including 39 with stable COPD (S-COPD) and 42 with treated COPD (T-COPD).

Effects of water deficit on fruit quality and water productivity of citrus under plastic film mulching in Western Hubei, China.

Introduction: The cultivation of Citrus sinensis Osbeck, the fruit with the largest planting scale and yield in Western Hubei Province of China, currently faces significant challenges related to low fruit quality and water use efficiency (WUE). This study aims to enhance citrus quality, yield, and WUE in the region by investigating the effects of water deficit and film mulching on 10-year-old citrus trees.

Methods: From 2019 to 2021, three levels of water deficit (Light: 80%-90%, Moderate:70%-80%, Severe: 60%-70% of field capacity) and four mulching treatments (A: Japanese film, B: Dupont film, C: Chinese film, and no mulching) were implemented at the young fruit stage.