Publications by authors named "Zengxin Qi"

Histamine functions as a neurotransmitter regulating multiple neural processes, whereas interleukin-10 (IL-10) is an anti-inflammatory cytokine with recognized neuroprotective properties. Previous research suggests that histamine can stimulate the release of various inflammatory mediators, including IL-10. However, the precise molecular mechanisms governing the interaction between histamine and IL-10, particularly their role in safeguarding dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson's disease (PD), have not been fully elucidated.

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Non-coding RNA transcribed from active enhancers, known as enhancer RNA (eRNA), is a critical element in gene regulation with a highly specific expression pattern in the regulatory networks of tumor-infiltrating cells. Therefore, eRNA signatures could potentially be applied to represent antitumor immune cells and to improve cancer immunotherapy. In this study, we identified thousands of eRNAs that were significantly correlated with infiltrating immune cell abundance in more than 10,000 patient samples across a variety of cancer types.

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The need for attention to enable statistical learning is debated. Testing individuals with impaired consciousness offers valuable insight, but very few studies have been conducted due to the difficulties inherent in such studies. Here, we examined the ability of patients with varying levels of disorders of consciousness (DOC) to extract statistical regularities from an artificial language composed of randomly concatenated pseudowords by measuring frequency tagging in EEG.

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Background And Objectives: The study aimed to investigate the potential pathogenesis and present an implant retention procedure for patients with titanium mesh exposure after cranioplasty.

Methods: The clinical data were obtained from 26 consecutive cases with titanium mesh exposure who underwent surgical treatment between 2018 and 2023. These patients' medical records, scalp photographs, operative notes, and outcomes were retrospectively analyzed.

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Objective: Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) is the most important molecular marker of glioma and is highly correlated to the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of patients. We proposed a real-time diagnosis method for IDH status differentiation based on automatic analysis of intraoperative contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) video.

Methods: Inspired by the Time Intensity Curve (TIC) analysis of CEUS utilized in clinical practice, this paper proposed an automatic CEUS video analysis method called ATAN (Automatic TIC Analysis Network).

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Resting state EEG in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is characterized by an increase of power in the delta frequency band and a concurrent decrease in the alpha range, equivalent to a weakening or disappearance of the alpha peak. Prolongation of Intrinsic Neural Timescales (INTs) is also associated with DOCs. Together, this raises the question whether the decreased alpha peak relates to the prolonged INTs and, importantly, how that can be used for diagnosing the state of consciousness in DOC individuals.

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Background: Disorders of consciousness (DoC) are a group of conditions that affect the level of awareness and communication in patients. While neuroimaging techniques can provide useful information about the brain structure and function in these patients, most existing methods rely on a single modality for analysis and rarely account for brain injury. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method that integrates two neuroimaging modalities, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to enhance the classification of subjects into different states of consciousness.

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Purpose: Glioma-associated epilepsy affects a significant proportion of glioma patients, contributing to disease progression and diminished survival rates. However, the lack of a reliable preoperative seizure predictor hampers effective surgical planning. This study investigates the potential of Alpha B crystallin protein (CRYAB) plasma levels as a predictive biomarker for epilepsy seizures in glioma patients.

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The globus pallidus plays a pivotal role in the basal ganglia circuit. Parkinson's disease is characterized by degeneration of dopamine-producing cells in the substantia nigra, which leads to dopamine deficiency in the brain that subsequently manifests as various motor and non-motor symptoms. This review aims to summarize the involvement of the globus pallidus in both motor and non-motor manifestations of Parkinson's disease.

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Glioma is a common malignant brain tumor with great heterogeneity and huge difference in clinical outcomes. Although lymphotoxin (LT) beta receptor (LTBR) has been linked to immune system and response development for decades, the expression and function in glioma have not been investigated. To confirm the expression profile of LTBR, integrated RNA-seq data from glioma and normal brain tissues were analyzed.

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Parkinson's disease (PD) is a motor disorder resulting from dopaminergic neuron degeneration in the substantia nigra caused by age, genetics, and environment. The disease severely impacts a patient's quality of life and can even be life-threatening. The hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channel is a member of the HCN1-4 gene family and is widely expressed in basal ganglia nuclei.

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Automatic brain segmentation of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI) patients is critical for brain abnormality assessments and brain network analysis. Construction of sTBI brain segmentation model requires manually annotated MR scans of sTBI patients, which becomes a challenging problem as it is quite impractical to implement sufficient annotations for sTBI images with large deformations and lesion erosion. Data augmentation techniques can be applied to alleviate the issue of limited training samples.

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Objective: As a single-transmembrane protein of the FXYD family, FXYD6 plays different roles under physiological and pathological status, especially in the nervous system. This study aims to identify FXYD6 as a biomarker for glioma, by analyzing its expression and methylation patterns.

Methods: Using TCGA and GTEx datasets, we analyzed FXYD6 expression in various tissues, confirming its levels in normal brain and different glioma grades via immunoblotting and immunostaining.

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Article Synopsis
  • Molecular diagnosis plays a key role in managing gliomas, but existing techniques have limitations for intraoperative use; this study introduces a novel approach using ultrasound radio-frequency (RF) signals for rapid diagnosis.
  • The research involved creating a brain tumor ultrasound bank with 169 cases, using data from 67 glioma cases to train a spatial-temporal integration model (STIM) that accurately identifies important molecular biomarkers related to gliomas.
  • STIM demonstrated impressive accuracy results in both retrospective (mean accuracy of 0.919) and prospective cohorts (mean accuracy ranging from 0.84 to 0.88 for specific mutations), outperforming traditional RF-based methods significantly.
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The time-varying brain activity may parallel the disease progression of cerebral glioma. Assessment of brain dynamics would better characterize the pathological profile of glioma and the relevant functional remodeling. This study aims to investigate the dynamic properties of functional networks based on sliding-window approach for patients with left frontal glioma.

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Background: The number of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) has increased dramatically with the advancement of intensive care and emergency medicine, which brings tremendous economic burdens and even ethical issues to families and society.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of neuromodulation therapy for patients with DoC.

Methods: First, we conducted a literature review of individual patient data (IPD) on PubMed, EMBASE, and Cochrane-controlled trials following PRISMA guidelines.

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Medical image segmentation methods are generally designed as fully-supervised to guarantee model performance, which requires a significant amount of expert annotated samples that are high-cost and laborious. Semi-supervised image segmentation can alleviate the problem by utilizing a large number of unlabeled images along with limited labeled images. However, learning a robust representation from numerous unlabeled images remains challenging due to potential noise in pseudo labels and insufficient class separability in feature space, which undermines the performance of current semi-supervised segmentation approaches.

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Purpose: The relationship between contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) hemodynamics and the molecular biomarkers of adult-type diffuse gliomas, particularly isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH), remains unclear. This study was conducted to provide a comprehensive description of the vascularization of adult-type diffuse gliomas using quantitative indicators. Additionally, it was designed to identify any variables with the potential to intraoperatively predict IDH mutation status.

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Time delays are a signature of many physical systems, including the brain, and considerably shape their dynamics; moreover, they play a key role in consciousness, as postulated by the temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). However, they are often not known a priori and need to be estimated from time series. In this study, we propose the use of permutation entropy (PE) to estimate time delays from neural time series as a more robust alternative to the widely used autocorrelation window (ACW).

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Aim: The functions of the interlaminar astrocytes in layer I of the human cortex are currently unknown. Here, we aimed to explore whether there is any morphological remodelling of interlaminar astrocytes in layer I of the temporal cortex in epilepsy.

Methods: Tissues were obtained from 17 epilepsy surgery patients and 17 post-mortem age-matched controls.

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In Parkinson's disease (PD), reduced dopamine levels in the basal ganglia have been associated with altered neuronal firing and motor dysfunction. It remains unclear whether the altered firing rate or pattern of basal ganglia neurons leads to parkinsonism-associated motor dysfunction. In the present study, we show that increased histaminergic innervation of the entopeduncular nucleus (EPN) in the mouse model of PD leads to activation of EPN parvalbumin (PV) neurons projecting to the thalamic motor nucleus via hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels coupled to postsynaptic HR.

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Making an appropriate diagnosis and administering effective treatment for hydrocephalus in patients with severe disorders of consciousness (DOC) remains controversial and difficult. Given that the typical symptoms are usually concealed by the limited behavioral responsiveness of patients with severe DOC, hydrocephalus diagnosis is likely to be missed in the clinic. Even if not, the presence of hydrocephalus may reduce the likelihood of DOC recovery, posing a conundrum for clinicians.

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Article Synopsis
  • Oxidative stress is linked to cerebral ischemic/reperfusion (I/R) injury, and the Keap1-Nrf2 pathway is important for maintaining cellular balance against it.
  • The small molecule 6 K has been identified as an inhibitor of the Keap1-Nrf2 interaction, showing potential for reducing oxidative damage in cerebral I/R injury.
  • In studies, 6 K significantly reduced brain damage and promoted recovery, enhancing the release of Nrf2 and protective enzymes, indicating its role in mitigating oxidative stress effects.
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Brain network analysis based on structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered as an effective method for consciousness evaluation of hydrocephalus patients, which can also be applied to facilitate the ameliorative effect of lumbar cerebrospinal fluid drainage (LCFD). Automatic brain parcellation is a prerequisite for brain network construction. However, hydrocephalus images usually have large deformations and lesion erosions, which becomes challenging for ensuring effective brain parcellation works.

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