Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering - Volume 26, issue s1
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Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering is to promote the welfare of humans and to help them keep healthy. This international journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes original research papers, review articles and brief notes on materials and engineering for biological and medical systems.
Articles in this peer-reviewed journal cover a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to: Engineering as applied to improving diagnosis, therapy, and prevention of disease and injury, and better substitutes for damaged or disabled human organs; Studies of biomaterial interactions with the human body, bio-compatibility, interfacial and interaction problems; Biomechanical behavior under biological and/or medical conditions; Mechanical and biological properties of membrane biomaterials; Cellular and tissue engineering, physiological, biophysical, biochemical bioengineering aspects; Implant failure fields and degradation of implants. Biomimetics engineering and materials including system analysis as supporter for aged people and as rehabilitation; Bioengineering and materials technology as applied to the decontamination against environmental problems; Biosensors, bioreactors, bioprocess instrumentation and control system; Application to food engineering; Standardization problems on biomaterials and related products; Assessment of reliability and safety of biomedical materials and man-machine systems; and Product liability of biomaterials and related products.
Abstract: Wireless power transmission (WPT) technology can solve the energy shortage problem of the video capsule endoscope (VCE) powered by button batteries, but the fixed platform limited its clinical application. This paper presents a portable WPT system for VCE. Besides portability, power transfer efficiency and stability are considered as the main indexes of optimization design of the system, which consists of the transmitting coil structure, portable control box, operating frequency, magnetic core and winding of receiving coil. Upon the above principles, the correlation parameters are measured, compared and chosen. Finally, through experiments on the platform, the methods are tested and evaluated.…In the gastrointestinal tract of small pig, the VCE is supplied with sufficient energy by the WPT system, and the energy conversion efficiency is 2.8%. The video obtained is clear with a resolution of 320×240 and a frame rate of 30 frames per second. The experiments verify the feasibility of design scheme, and further improvement direction is discussed.
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Keywords: Portable wireless power transmission, video capsule endoscope, resonant circuit, frequency stability
Abstract: Mobile health (mHealth) technology has been proposed to alleviate the lack of sufficient medical resources for personal healthcare. However, usage difficulties and compliance issues relating to this technology restrict the effect of mHealth system-supported self-management. In this study, an mHealth framework is introduced to overcome these drawbacks and improve the outcome of self-management. We implemented a set of ease of use principles in the mHealth design and employed the quantitative Fogg Behavior Model to enhance users’ execution ability. The framework was realized in a prototype design for the mHealth system, which consists of medical apparatuses, mobile applications and a health…management server. The system is able to monitor the physiological status in an unconstrained manner with simplified operations, while supervising the healthcare plan. The results suggest that the present framework design is accessible for ordinary users and effective in improving users’ execution ability in self-management.
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Keywords: Self-management, mobile health, execution ability, ease of use, persuasive technology
Abstract: Many types of fully implantable hearing aids have been developed. Most of these devices are implanted behind the ear. To maintain the implanted device for a long period of time, a rechargeable battery and wireless power transmission are used. Because inductive coupling is the most renowned method for wireless power transmission, many types of fully implantable hearing aids are transcutaneously powered using inductively coupled coils. Some patients with an implantable hearing aid require a method for conveniently charging their hearing aid while they are resting or sleeping. To address this need, a wireless charging pillow has been developed that employs…a circular array coil as one of its primary parts. In this device, all primary coils are simultaneously driven to maintain an effective charging area regardless of head motion. In this case, however, there may be a magnetic weak zone that cannot be charged at the specific secondary coil’s location on the array coil. In this study, assuming that a maximum charging distance is 4 cm, a circular array coil—serving as a primary part of the charging pillow—was designed using finite element analysis. Based on experimental results, the proposed device can charge an implantable hearing aid without a magnetic weak zone within 4 cm of the perpendicular distance between the primary and secondary coils.
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Keywords: Wireless charging pillow, fully implantable hearing aid, inductive coupling, circular array coil, magnetic weak zone
Abstract: Snoring detection is important for diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) and other respiratory sleep disorders. In general, audio signal processing such as snoring sound analysis uses the frequency characteristics of the signal. Recently, a correlational filter Multilayer Perceptron neural network (f-MLP) has been proposed, which has the first hidden layer of correlational filter operations in frequency domain. It demonstrated a superior classification performance for the pattern sets; of these, frequency information is the dominant feature for classification. The first hidden layer is implemented with the correlational filter operation; its output is the power spectrum of the filter output, while…the other layers are the same as the ordinary multilayer Perceptron (o-MLP). By using the back-propagation learning algorithm for the correlational filter layer, f-MLP was able to self-adapt the filter coefficients to produce its output with more discrimination power for classification in the higher layer. In this research, this f-MLP was applied for sleep snoring signal detection. As a result, the f-MLP achieved an average detection rate of 96% for the test patterns, compared to the conventional multilayer neural network that demonstrates an 82% average detection rate.
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Abstract: In the data mining field, classification is a very crucial technology, and the Bayesian classifier has been one of the hotspots in classification research area. However, assumptions of Naive Bayesian and Tree Augmented Naive Bayesian (TAN) are unfair to attribute relations. Therefore, this paper proposes a new algorithm named Fuzzy Naive Bayesian (FNB) using neural network with weighted membership function (NEWFM) to extract regulated relations and weights. Then, we can use regulated relations and weights to construct a regulated network. Finally, we will classify the heart and Haberman datasets by the FNB network to compare with experiments of Naive Bayesian…and TAN. The experiment results show that the FNB has a higher classification rate than Naive Bayesian and TAN.
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Abstract: MicroRNAs (miRNA) are known to be involved in the development of various diseases. Hence various scientists in the field have been utilized computational analyses to determine the relationship between miRNA and diseases. However, the knowledge of miRNA and disease is still very limited. Therefore, we combined Environmental Factor (EF) data to a miRNA global network. Increasing research has shown that relationship between miRNAs and EFs play a significant role in classifying types of diseases. Environmental Factors consist of radiation, drugs, viruses, alcohol, cigarettes, and stress. Our global network considered all the interactions between every pair of miRNAs, which has led…to precise analyses in comparison to local networks. As a result, our approaches’ performance demonstrated its effectiveness in identifying disease-related miRNA and this is the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 74.46%. Furthermore, comparative experiment has shown that our approach performs comparable to other existing methods with an accuracy of 94%, 90% and 96% for breast cancer, colonic cancer, and lung cancer respectively. In conclusion, these results support that our research has broadened new biological insights on identifying disease-related miRNAs.
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Abstract: A spectrophotometer is the basic measuring equipment essential to most research activity fields requiring samples to be measured, such as physics, biotechnology and food engineering. This paper proposes a system that is able to detect sample concentration and color information by using LED and color sensor. Purity and wavelength information can be detected by CIE diagram, and the concentration can be estimated with purity information. This method is more economical and efficient than existing spectrophotometry, and can also be used by ordinary persons. This contribution is applicable to a number of fields because it can be used as a colorimeter…to detect the wavelength and purity of samples.
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Keywords: Color information, color space, light emitting diode, spectrophotometer
Abstract: Multiple sequence alignment plays a key role in the computational analysis of biological data. Different programs are developed to analyze the sequence similarity. This paper highlights the algorithmic techniques of the most popular multiple sequence alignment programs. These programs are then evaluated on the basis of execution time and scalability. The overall performance of these programs is assessed to highlight their strengths and weaknesses with reference to their algorithmic techniques. In terms of overall alignment quality, T-Coffee and Mafft attain the highest average scores, whereas K-align has the minimum computation time.
Abstract: Due to next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, genome sequencing is able to process much more data at low cost. In NGS data analysis, the mapping of sequences into a reference genome takes the largest amount of time to process. Although the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) tool is one of the most widely used open-source software tools to align read sequences, it is still limited in that it does not fully support multi-thread mechanisms during the alignment steps. In this paper, we propose a BWA-MT tool, evolved from BWA but supporting multi-thread computation, designed to fully utilize the underlying multi-core architecture of computing…resources. By using multi-thread computation, BWA-MT can significantly shorten the time needed to generate an alignment for single-end read sequences. Meanwhile, it generates an identical Sequence Alignment Map (SAM) result file as BWA. To evaluate BWA-MT, we use an evaluation system equipped with twelve cores and 32 GB memory. As a workload, we used the hg19 human genome reference sequence and various numbers of read sequences from 1M to 40M. In our evaluation, BWA-MT displays up to 3.7 times faster performance and generates an identical SAM result file to BWA. Although the increased speed might be dependent on computing resources, we confirm that BWA-MT is highly efficient and effective.
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Abstract: Due to the generation of enormous amounts of data at both lower costs as well as in shorter times, whole-exome sequencing technologies provide dramatic opportunities for identifying disease genes implicated in Mendelian disorders. Since upwards of thousands genomic variants can be sequenced in each exome, it is challenging to filter pathogenic variants in protein coding regions and reduce the number of missing true variants. Therefore, an automatic and efficient pipeline for finding disease variants in Mendelian disorders is designed by exploiting a combination of variants filtering steps to analyze the family-based exome sequencing approach. Recent studies on the Freeman-Sheldon disease…are revisited and show that the proposed method outperforms other existing candidate gene identification methods.
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Abstract: High order partial least squares (HOPLS) is a novel data processing method. It is highly suitable for building prediction model which has tensor input and output. The objective of this study is to build a prediction model of the relationship between sinoatrial node field potential and high glucose using HOPLS. The three sub-signals of the sinoatrial node field potential made up the model’s input. The concentration and the actuation duration of high glucose made up the model’s output. The results showed that on the premise of predicting two dimensional variables, HOPLS had the same predictive ability and a lower dispersion…degree compared with partial least squares (PLS).
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Keywords: High order partial least squares, sinoatrial node field potential, prediction model, signal decomposition
Abstract: Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) approaches succeed in detecting a number of diseases, however, they are not good at addressing atrial hypertrophy disease due to the lack of training data. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is very popular in few CAD solutions to atrial hypertrophy. Yet the performance of SVM is moderate in atrial hypertrophy detection compared to its success in other classification problems. In this paper we propose a novel CAD algorithm, Local Discriminative SVM (LDSVM), to overcome the above-mentioned difficulty. LDSVM consists of a global SVM that is trained on the training data, and a local kNN that is trained based…on the information of SVM and query. When a query arrives, SVM gives the initial decision. If the initial decision is less confident, local kNN begins to modify the initial decision. LDSVM improves the accuracy of SVM through some contributions: the risk tube, the discriminant information derived from SVM hyperplane, the new metric and the self-tuning size of neighborhood. Empirical evidence on real medical datasets show high performance of LDSVM over the peers in addressing atrial hypertrophy problems.
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Keywords: Computer-aided diagnosis, support vector machine, discriminative direction, derivative of hyperplane function
Abstract: The classification of subjects’ pathologies enables a rigorousness to be applied to the treatment of certain pathologies, as doctors on occasions play with so many variables that they can end up confusing some illnesses with others. Thanks to Machine Learning techniques applied to a health-record database, it is possible to make using our algorithm. hClass contains a non-linear classification of either a supervised, non-supervised or semi-supervised type. The machine is configured using other techniques such as validation of the set to be classified (cross-validation), reduction in features (PCA) and committees for assessing the various classifiers. The tool is easy to…use, and the sample matrix and features that one wishes to classify, the number of iterations and the subjects who are going to be used to train the machine all need to be introduced as inputs. As a result, the success rate is shown either via a classifier or via a committee if one has been formed. A 90% success rate is obtained in the ADABoost classifier and 89.7% in the case of a committee (comprising three classifiers) when PCA is applied. This tool can be expanded to allow the user to totally characterise the classifiers by adjusting them to each classification use.
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Abstract: G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are seven membrane-spanning proteins and regulate many important physiological processes, such as vision, neurotransmission, immune response and so on. GPCRs-related pathways are the targets of a large number of marketed drugs. Therefore, the design of a reliable computational model for predicting GPCRs from amino acid sequence has long been a significant biomedical problem. Chaos game representation (CGR) reveals the fractal patterns hidden in protein sequences, and then fractal dimension (FD) is an important feature of these highly irregular geometries with concise mathematical expression. Here, in order to extract important features from GPCR protein sequences, CGR algorithm, fractal…dimension and amino acid composition (AAC) are employed to formulate the numerical features of protein samples. Four groups of features are considered, and each group is evaluated by support vector machine (SVM) and 10-fold cross-validation test. To test the performance of the present method, a new non-redundant dataset was built based on latest GPCRDB database. Comparing the results of numerical experiments, the group of combined features with AAC and FD gets the best result, the accuracy is 99.22% and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) is 0.9845 for identifying GPCRs from non-GPCRs. Moreover, if it is classified as a GPCR, it will be further put into the second level, which will classify a GPCR into one of the five main subfamilies. At this level, the group of combined features with AAC and FD also gets best accuracy 85.73%. Finally, the proposed predictor is also compared with existing methods and shows better performances.
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Keywords: GPCR, chaos game representation, support vector machine, fractal dimension
Abstract: Tuberculosis (TB), caused by infection with mycobacterium tuberculosis, is still a major threat to human health worldwide. Current diagnostic methods encounter some limitations, such as sample collection problem or unsatisfied sensitivity and specificity issue. Moreover, it is hard to identify TB from some of other lung diseases without invasive biopsy. In this paper, the logistic models with three representative regularization approaches including Lasso (the most popular regularization method), and L 1 / 2 (the method that inclines to achieve more sparse…solution than Lasso) and Elastic Net (the method that encourages a grouping effect of genes in the results) adopted together to select the common gene signatures in microarray data of peripheral blood cells. As the result, 13 common gene signatures were selected, and sequentially the classifier based on them is constructed by the SVM approach, which can accurately distinguish tuberculosis from other pulmonary diseases and healthy controls. In the test and validation datasets of the blood gene expression profiles, the generated classification model achieved 91.86% sensitivity and 93.48% specificity averagely. Its sensitivity is improved 6%, but only 26% gene signatures used compared to recent research results. These 13 gene signatures selected by our methods can be used as the basis of a blood-based test for the detection of TB from other pulmonary diseases and healthy controls.
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Keywords: Tuberculosis, feature selection, early diagnostic, regularization, biomarkers
Abstract: Application of the Next generation sequencing (NGS) technology has demonstrated that most tumor samples exhibit intra-tumor heterogeneity. Here we proposed SAPPH (Somatic Aberrations Prediction for Paired Heterogeneous tumor samples), as a new method for estimating tumor somatic copy number aberrations as well as inferring tumor subclone proportions from heterogeneous tumor sequencing data. This method is based on CBS and local proportion clustering strategy. When SAPPH is applied on simulated tumor samples, the agreement between the results analyzed by SAPPH and the sequencing signals suggests that SAPPH can find the solution to best fit the signal distributions. We benchmark the performance…of SAPPH and show that it outperforms existing method in estimating tumor copy number aberrations.
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Keywords: Intra-tumor heterogeneity, NGS, copy number aberration, tumor subclone, proportion
Abstract: To address the imbalanced classification problem emerging in Bioinformatics, a boundary movement-based extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm called BM-ELM was proposed. BM-ELM tries to firstly explore the prior information about data distribution by condensing all training instances into the one-dimensional feature space corresponding to the original output in ELM, and then on the transformed space, to find the optimal moving distance of the classification hyperplane by estimating the probability density distributions of the instances in different classes. Experimental results on four real imbalanced bioinformatics classification data sets indicated that the proposed BM-ELM algorithm outperforms some traditional bias correction algorithms due…to it can greatly improve the sensitivity of the classification results with small loss of specificity as possible. Also, BM-ELM algorithm has presented better performance than the widely used support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The algorithm can be widely popularized in various large-scale bioinformatics applications.
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Keywords: Bioinformatics, extreme learning machine, imbalanced classification, kernel density estimation
Abstract: Fuzzy clustering is an important tool for analyzing microarray data. A major problem in applying fuzzy clustering method to microarray gene expression data is the choice of parameters with cluster number and centers. This paper proposes a new approach to fuzzy kernel clustering analysis (FKCA) that identifies desired cluster number and obtains more steady results for gene expression data. First of all, to optimize characteristic differences and estimate optimal cluster number, Gaussian kernel function is introduced to improve spectrum analysis method (SAM). By combining subtractive clustering with max-min distance mean, maximum distance method (MDM) is proposed to determine cluster centers.…Then, the corresponding steps of improved SAM (ISAM) and MDM are given respectively, whose superiority and stability are illustrated through performing experimental comparisons on gene expression data. Finally, by introducing ISAM and MDM into FKCA, an effective improved FKCA algorithm is proposed. Experimental results from public gene expression data and UCI database show that the proposed algorithms are feasible for cluster analysis, and the clustering accuracy is higher than the other related clustering algorithms.
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Keywords: Spectral analysis, maximum distance, fuzzy clustering, gene expression data
Abstract: Obesity has become an increasingly serious health problem and popular research topic. It is associated with many diseases, especially cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related endothelial dysfunction. This study analyzed genes related to endothelial dysfunction and obesity and then summarized their most significant signaling pathways. Genes related to vascular endothelial dysfunction and obesity were extracted from a PubMed database, and analyzed by STRING, DAVID, and Gene-Go Meta-Core software. 142 genes associated with obesity were found to play a role in endothelial dysfunction in PubMed. A significant pathway (Angiotensin system maturation in protein folding and maturation) associated with obesity and endothelial dysfunction was explored.…The genes and the pathway explored may play an important role in obesity. Further studies about preventing vascular endothelial dysfunction obesity should be conducted through targeting these loci and pathways.
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Keywords: Pathway, obesity, vascular endothelial function, system biology
Abstract: DNA-binding proteins are involved and play a crucial role in a lot of important biological processes. Hence, the identification of the DNA-binding proteins is a challenging and significant problem. In order to reveal the intrinsic information correlated to DNA-binding, nine classes of candidate features based on different mathematical fields are applied to construct the prediction model with random forest. They are fractal dimension, conjoint triad feature, Hilbert-Huang Transformation, amino acid composition, dipeptide composition, chaos game representation, and the corresponding information entropies. These mathematical expressions are evaluated with 5-fold cross validation test. The results of numerical simulations show that the mathematical…features consisted of amino acid composition, fractal dimension and information entropies of amino acid and chaos game representation achieve the best performance. Its accuracy is 0.8157, and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) achieves 0.5968 on the benchmark dataset from DNA-Prot. By analyzing the components of top combination of the nine candidate features, the concepts of fractal dimension and information entropy are the effective and vital features, which can provide complementary sequence-order information on the basis of amino acid composition.
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Keywords: DNA-binding proteins, random forest, information entropy, fractal dimension, Hilbert-Huang transformation
Abstract: The problem of gene recognition based on the ratio of power spectrum, SNR, and Gabor transform and its implementation of the calculation were discussed. The optimal threshold could guarantee to identify the DNA sequences with the signal-to-noise ratio. It summarized three kinds of traditional ways to determine the threshold, and advanced the optimum entitled method showing the disparate degrees of highlight and the discrimination rate method of the exons or introns as far as possible to improve the rate of their accuracy. To evaluate different determination methods of threshold by using the calculation results of four kinds of DNA sequence.…In order to ensure the analysis of DNA sequence more accurate, it adopted and improved gene identification method of Fourier transformation in a short time which is based on Gabor transformation. By using of the ergodic theory, the fixed percentage of the sequence length of exons in DNA has been improved to be the dynamic percentages which focus on different gene types. The exons of the DNA sequence which have been already discovered were identified by using the improved algorithm. With comparison of the results and the actual endpoint of exons, it confirmed that the improved algorithm can figure out the endpoint of the exons more accurate.
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Abstract: Currently, the mechanisms underlying chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remain unclear. As potential biomarkers, microRNAs (miRNAs), which modulate the levels of specific genes and proteins, are important for enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms behind COPD. Although there have been a number of miRNA expression profiling analyses strategies used to document miRNA expression changes during physiological and pathological processes or used to identify differentially expressed miRNAs in disease or control samples, the study results have been inconsistently replicated using different datasets. For this reason, many findings cannot be well synthesized and interpreted. To address this issue, we used a multiple…co-inertia analysis (MCIA) method to extract potential COPD-related miRNAs using three COPD microarray datasets. The results showed that miR-223, miR-132, and miR-199a-5p are obviously associated with COPD, and these results are consistent with the highly significant differentially-expressed miRNAs that were observed across three microarray datasets. Moreover, when miR-223, miR-132, and miR-199a-5p are taken as predictors to classify the samples of three datasets, the pooled sensitivity and specificity is 0.96 and 0.75, respectively, thereby suggesting that these three miRNAs can effectively distinguish COPD patients and controls.
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Abstract: Epigenetic computational analyses based on Markov chains can integrate dependencies between regions in the genome that are directly adjacent. In this paper, the BED files of fifteen chromatin states of the Broad Histone Track of the ENCODE project are parsed, and comparative nucleotide frequencies of regional chromatin blocks are thoroughly analyzed to detect the Markov property in them. We perform various tests to examine the Markov property embedded in a frequency domain by checking for the presence of the Markov property in the various chromatin states. We apply these tests to each region of the fifteen chromatin states. The results…of our simulation indicate that some of the chromatin states possess a stronger Markov property than others. We discuss the significance of our findings in statistical models of nucleotide sequences that are necessary for the computational analysis of functional units in noncoding DNA.
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Abstract: Naive Bayesian (NB) network classifier is a simple and well-known type of classifier, which can be easily induced from a DNA microarray data set. However, a strong conditional independence assumption of NB network sometimes can lead to weak classification performance. In this paper, we propose a new approach of interactive naive Bayesian (INB) network to weaken the conditional independence of NB network and classify cancers using DNA microarray data set. We selected the differently expressed genes (DEGs) to reduce the dimension of the microarray data set. Then, an interactive parent which has the biggest influence among all DEGs is searched…for each DEG. And then we calculate a weight to represent the interactive relationship between a DEG and its parent. Finally, the gene-gene interaction network is constructed. We experimentally test the INB network in terms of classification accuracy using leukemia and colon DNA microarray data sets, then we compare it with the NB network. The INB network can get higher classification accuracies than NB network. And INB network can show the gene-gene interactions visually.
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Abstract: A computer model to simulate the processes of charge injection and migration through DNA after irradiation by a heavy charged particle was developed. The most probable sites of charge injection were obtained by merging spatial models of short DNA sequence and a single 1 GeV/u iron particle track simulated by the code RITRACKS (Relativistic Ion Tracks). Charge migration was simulated by using a quantum-classical nonlinear model of the DNA–charge system. It was found that charge migration depends on the environmental conditions. The oxidative damage in DNA occurring during hole migration was simulated concurrently, which allowed the determination of probable locations…of radiation-induced DNA lesions.
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Abstract: The designing of H ∞ fuzzy controller for HIV/AIDS infected dynamic system has been considered in this paper. With TS fuzzy model and LMIs approach, the proposed controller is obtained for such a system. A set of sufficient conditions of the H ∞ controller is given to ensure the closed-loop system asymptotic stability and the prescribed…H ∞ performance level. Finally, the effectiveness of the fuzzy controller design approach is finally presented through the simulation results.
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Keywords: H∞ control, TS fuzzy model, robust control, linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), HIV/AIDS infection system, robust control
Abstract: In view of the characteristics of high dimension, small samples, nonlinearity and numeric type in the gene expression profile data, the logistic and the correlation information entropy are introduced into the feature gene selection. At first, the gene variable is screened preliminarily by logistic regression to obtain the genes that have a greater impact on the classification; then, the candidate features set is generated by deleting the unrelated features using Relief algorithm. On the basis of this, delete redundant features by using the correlation information entropy; finally, the feature gene subset is classified by using the classifier of support vector…machine (SVM). Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain smaller subset of genes and achieve higher recognition rate.
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Keywords: Gene chips, logistic, correlation information entropy, feature selection
Abstract: Microarray data has small samples and high dimension, and it contains a significant amount of irrelevant and redundant genes. This paper proposes a hybrid ensemble method based on double disturbance to improve classification performance. Firstly, original genes are ranked through reliefF algorithm and part of the genes are selected from the original genes set, and then a new training set is generated from the original training set according to the previously selected genes. Secondly, D bootstrap training subsets are produced from the previously generated training set by bootstrap technology. Thirdly, an attribute reduction method based on neighborhood mutual information…with a different radius is used to reduce genes on each bootstrap training subset to produce new training subsets. Each new training subset is applied to train a base classifier. Finally, a part of the base classifiers are selected based on the teaching-learning-based optimization to build an ensemble by weighted voting. Experimental results on six benchmark cancer microarray datasets showed proposed method decreased ensemble size and obtained higher classification performance compared with Bagging, AdaBoost, and Random Forest.
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Abstract: Multi-label classification is useful in many bioinformatics tasks such as gene function prediction and protein site localization. This paper presents an improved neural network algorithm, Max Label Distance Back Propagation Algorithm for Multi-Label Classification. The method was formulated by modifying the total error function of the standard BP by adding a penalty term, which was realized by maximizing the distance between the positive and negative labels. Extensive experiments were conducted to compare this method against state-of-the-art multi-label methods on three popular bioinformatic benchmark datasets. The results illustrated that this proposed method is more effective for bioinformatic multi-label classification compared to…commonly used techniques.
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Abstract: In some GWAs studies, GALNT2 and APOE polymorphisms have been identified to be related to alterations of plasma or serum HDL-C and TG concentrations. The purpose of our study is to assess the contribution of GALNT2 rs4846914, APOE rs429358, rs7412, rs405509 variants, and several environmental factors to the development of hypertension disease in the China Han population. A hospital-based case-control study was conducted. Cases were hypertension (n =211) and controls were normal participants (n =434). The AA, AG, and GG genotype frequencies of GALNT2 rs4846914 were 22.8%, 43.1%, and 34.1% in hypertension subjects, and 35.3%, 44.2%, and 20.5% in controls…(P <0.05), respectively. The OR of the AG genotype adjusted for all risk factors compared to the AA genotype was 1.61 (95%CI: 1.02 to 2.56) and to the GG genotype 2.67 (95%CI: 1.59 to 4.488). There was no significant difference between the APOE rs429358, rs7412, and rs405509 genotype frequencies in hypertension and control subjects. The present work indicates that SNP rs4846914 in GALNT2 gene is related to an increased risk of hypertension in China Han population, but the APOE gene is not.
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Keywords: Gene polymorphisms, GALNT2, APOE, hypertension, China
Abstract: Rifampin is an important drug used in the treatment of tuberculosis, and it increases the drug metabolism in human hepatocytes. Previous studies have shown that rifampin can indirectly influence drug deposition through the regulation of molecular interactions of miRNA, PXR and other genes. The potential functions of miRNAs associated with rifampin- induced drug disposition are poorly understood. In this study, significantly differentially expressed miRNAs (SDEM) were extracted and used to predict the miRNA-regulated co-expression target genes (MCeTG). Additionally, a miRNA-regulated co-expressed protein interaction network (MCePIN) was constructed for SDEM by extending from the protein interaction network (PIN). The functioning of…the miRNAs were analyzed using GO analysis and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis. A total of 20 miRNAs belonging to SDEM were identified, and 632 miRNA-regulated genes were predicted. The MCePIN was constructed by extending from PIN, and 10 miRNAs and 33 genes that are relevant to 7 functions, including response to wounding, wound healing, response to drug, defense response, inflammatory response, liver development and drug metabolism, were discerned. The results provided by this study offer valuable insights into the effect of rifampin on miRNAs, genes and protein levels.
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Keywords: Rifampin, miRNA, gene, hepatocyte, PPI network, P450
Abstract: We present a new genetic filter to identify a predictive gene subset for cancer-type classification on gene expression profiles. This approach pursues to not only maximize correlation between selected genes and cancer types but also minimize inter-correlation among selected genes. The proposed genetic filter was tested on well-known leukemia datasets, and significant improvement over previous work was obtained.
Keywords: Gene selection, filter method, genetic algorithm, cancer classification, gene expression data
Abstract: Protein subcellular localization prediction is currently receiving much attention in the field of protein research. Many researchers make great efforts to study single-site protein subcellular localization, but the experimental data shows that many proteins can be found in two or more sub-cellular locations, prompting the study of multisite protein sub-cellular localization. This study utilized a Gpos-mPLOC data set and pseudo amino acid compositions, physicochemical properties of amino acid composition, and entropy density as three effective feature extraction methods. Then, these features were then placed in a multi-label k nearest neighbor classifier to predict subcellular protein locations. Experimental results verified that…this approach provides a localization precision of 66.73% through the Jack-knife test.
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Abstract: One of the important problems in microarray gene expression data is tumor classification. This paper proposes a new feature selection method for tumor classification using gene expression data. In this method, three dimensionality reduction methods, including principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA) and independent component analysis (ICA), are first introduced to extract and select features for tumor classification, and their corresponding specific steps are given respectively. Then, the superiority of three algorithms is demonstrated by performing experimental comparisons on acute leukemia data sets. It is concluded that PCA compared with FA and ICA is the best under feature load…ratio. However, PCA cannot make full use of the category information. To overcome the weak point, Fisher linear discriminant (FLD) is employed as those components of PCA, and a new approach to principal component discriminant analysis (PCDA) is proposed to retain all assets and work better than both PCA and FLD for classification. The further experimental results show that the classification ability of selected feature subsets by means of PCDA is higher than that of the other related dimensionality reduction methods, and the proposed algorithm is efficient and feasible for tumor classification.
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Keywords: Feature selection, principal component, discriminant analysis, classification
Abstract: Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is capable of producing a chitin-binding protein believed to be functionally important to bacteria during the stationary phase of its growth cycle. In this paper, the chitin-binding domain 3 protein HD73_3189 from B. thuringiensis has been analyzed by computer technology. Primary and secondary structural analyses demonstrated that HD73_3189 is negatively charged and contains several α -helices, aperiodical coils and β -strands. Domain and motif analyses revealed that HD73_3189 contains a signal peptide, an N-terminal chitin binding 3 domains, two copies of a fibronectin-like domain 3 and a C-terminal carbohydrate binding domain classified as CBM_5_12. Moreover,…analysis predicted the protein’s associated localization site to be the cell wall. Ligand site prediction determined that amino acid residues GLU-312, TRP-334, ILE-341 and VAL-382 exposed on the surface of the target protein exhibit polar interactions with the substrate.
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Abstract: Hematocrit is a blood test that is defined as the volume percentage of red blood cells in the whole blood. It is one of the important indicators for clinical decision making and the most effective factor in glucose measurement using handheld devices. In this paper, a method for hematocrit estimation that is based upon the transduced current curve and the neural network is presented. The salient points of this method are that (1) the neural network is trained by the online sequential extreme learning machine (OS-ELM) in which the devices can be still trained with new samples during the using…process and (2) the extended features are used to reduce the number of current points which can save the battery power of devices and speed up the measurement process.
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Abstract: In order to explore the effects of hydrogen sulfide (H2 S) on myocardial fibrosis in diabetic rats and its underlying mechanisms, intraperitoneal injections of streptozotocin were used to establish the diabetes models and sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS) was used as an exogenous donor of H2 S. Eight weeks later, Van Gieson staining was used to observe pathological changes, and basic hydrolysis methods were adopted to measure hydroxyproline content, while Western Blot was used to determine the expression of MMP2, MMP7, MMP11, MMP13, MMP16, TIMP1 and TGFβ 1.The results showed that significant myocardial fibrosis, decreased TIMP1 and MMP2 expression and increased MMP7,…MMP11, MMP13, MMP16 expressions occurred in diabetic group, but all these changes were significantly reversed in diabetic rats after NaHS treatment. This suggests that H2 S could attenuate cardiac fibrosis induced by diabetes and its mechanisms may be related to its modulation of MMPs/TIMPs expression and regulation of TGFβ 1.
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Abstract: Our study aimed at investigating the effect of different molecular weight bovine collagen peptides, namely CH878, CH1370, CH2900, and CH7747 on the differentiation of MC3T3-E1 cells. Osteogenic differentiation of MC3T3-E1 cells was assessed by a series of specific assays, after culturing of cells in the presence of collagen peptides. Alkaline phosphatase activity (ALP) was evaluated by NBT/BCIP staining. Osteocalcin expression was determined by a radioimmunology method. Mineralization was quantified by Alizarin Red staining. ALP staining results demonstrated that the ALP staining of cells after culture in the presence of collagen peptides were significantly higher than the control group (P<0.05), indicating…the promotion of ALP activity in MC3T3-E1 cells by these peptides. Radioimmunology results demonstrated that collagen peptides groups were all significantly higher than the control group (P<0.01). Alizarin Red staining results demonstrated that CH1370, CH2900, and CH7747 significantly promoted the formation of mineralized bone matrix. We therefore conclude that CH1370, CH2900, and CH7747 play an active role in the differentiation of MC3T3-E1 cells. Based on the above results, we provide molecular basis for further development of collagens with different molecular weight for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.
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Keywords: Different molecular weight collagen peptides, MC3T3-E1 cells, differentiation
Abstract: In this paper, the hemoglobin (Hb) re-released from red blood cells (RBCs) and whole blood of 7 carcinoma patients were studied by using electrophoresis release test (ERT), which was established by our lab. Among the 7 carcinoma patients, the re-released Hb was distinctively increased from an intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma patient during one-dimension isotonic ERT. Different from the others, the result of double-dimension Hb re-release of this intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma patient showed that not only HbA but also HbA2 could be re-released from both RBCs and whole blood. The result of isotonic & hypotonic ERT which was performed…at room temperature showed that more Hb could be re-released from both RBCs and whole blood of the intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma patient than that of the normal control. After keeping the samples at 37°C for 1 hour, the re-released Hb from RBCs could still be found more than that of the normal control, but was disappeared completely from the whole blood sample. To our surprise, when the isotonic & hypotonic ERT was repeated 2 days later at 37°C, the re-released Hb from RBCs of the intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma patient was increased only in tube 4-6, and disappeared in the other tube. Further mechanism research work cannot be continued because of the patient’s leave, but ERT is speculated to be a useful and effective technology to observe the physiological or pathological change of RBCs, blood or body in the future.
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Keywords: Hemoglobin, red blood cell, electrophoresis release test, intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma
Abstract: Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α ) has been used as an effective treatment for Hepatocellular Carcinoma, however, inducing tumor cell apoptosis by TNF-α alone is still unsatisfactory. RhoA is highly expressed in hepatocarcinoma cells and can be activated by TNF-α . The activation of RhoA directly leads to a poor prognosis of HCC. Therefore, we propose to investigate the therapeutic effect of TNF-α together with RhoA siRNA. RhoA inhibition was accomplished by constructing a recombinant adenovirus that can efficiently express RhoA siRNA in HepG2 cells. The recombinant adenovirus AdshRNA-RhoA and AdU6-control were generated by adenovirus-mediated siRNA expression system. The…inhibition effects were detected by RT-PCR in addition to immunoblot to quantify the decreased levels of RhoA expression, and the therapeutic effect for HCC was demonstrated by the proliferation and apoptosis ratios of HepG2 cells. The inhibition effects of RhoA by AdshRNA-RhoA were significant at both mRNA and protein levels: the transcription of RhoA mRNA decreased by 74.46%, and the expression of protein decreased by 76.48%. The proliferation rate of HepG2 cells detected by MTT showed that a treatment of AdshRNA-RhoA and TNF-α together could strengthen the suppression ability of TNF-α to HepG2 cells, resulting in approximately 14.2% more than those treated with only TNF-α . FCA and TUNEL assays results revealed that the combined treatment can induce apoptosis in approximately 52.14%-65% of the HepG2 cells, whereas this ratio in the TNF-α -alone group was only 21.91%-32%. Our results showed that AdshRNA-RhoA can efficiently enhance the TNF-α -induced apoptosis of hepatocarcinoma cells. This method might be a useful therapeutic route in HCC and other tumors.
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Abstract: Polysaccharides derived from Ginkgo biloba leaf (PGBL) is a kind of active ingredient came out from ginkgo biloba leaf extractions. Previous studies have shown that PGBL has a good anti-inflammatory effect. However, the mechanism is not clear. This study is to investigate the modulated immunity effect of PGBL on RAW264.7 cells. Here we showed that lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induces the expression of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α ) and interleukin-6 (IL-6), and this induction can be repressed by PGBL treatment both in protein level and mRNA level, and PGBL strongly reduced the translocation of nuclear factor (NF)-κ B to the cell…nucleus. These findings demonstrate that PGBL can decrease the sensitivity of monocytes to LPS, and PGBL has applications in systemic inflammation and immune diseases.
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Abstract: The effects of noise on the calcium oscillations in a cell exposed to electromagnetic fields are described by a dynamic model. Noise is a very important factor to be considered in the dynamic research on the calcium oscillations in a cell exposed to electromagnetic fields. Some meaningful results have been obtained here based on the discussion. The results show that the pattern of intracellular calcium oscillations exposure to electromagnetic fields can be influenced by noise. Furthermore, the intracellular calcium oscillations exposure to electromagnetic fields can also be induced by noise. And the work has also studied the relationships between the…voltage sensitive calcium channel’s open probability and electromagnetic field. The result can provide new insights into constructive roles and potential applications of selecting appropriate electromagnetic field frequency during the research of biological effect of electromagnetic field.
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Keywords: Calcium oscillations, noise, electromagnetic fields, open probability
Abstract: To analyze the potential molecular mechanism of ultrasound induced apoptosis in cancer cells, comparative proteomic methods were introduced in the study. After ultrasound exposure at the intensity of 1.2 W/cm2 , the human SMMC-7721 hepatocarcinoma cells were stained by trypan blue to detect the morphologic changes, and then the flow cytometry was used to examine the percentage of early apoptosis via double staining of FITC-labelled Annexin V and Propidium iodide. The proteins were separated by two-dimensional (2D) SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). Among them, the differently expressed proteins were identified by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry to reveal the key proteins response…to ultrasound exposure. It’s proved early apoptosis of cells were induced by focused ultrasound. After ultrasound exposure, the expressing characteristics of several proteins changed, in which some proteins in HSP family are associated with apoptosis initiation. It is suggested that the focused ultrasound could be applied in the assistant cancer therapy. Moreover, it is proved the comparative proteomic methods could supply information about the protein expression to analyze the metabolic processes related to bio-effects of biomedical ultrasound.
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Abstract: In this paper, we report the development of a protein microarray-based biosensor for the detection of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) serological markers using surface plasmon resonance (SPR Printing buffer, protein immobilization time and concentration of the capture protein were optimized systematically to determine the best performance of the biosensor. Under optimal conditions, five hepatitis B markers in 20 μ L human serum can be simultaneously detected within 30 minutes, whereas other methods such as ELISA and PCR can detect only one marker within four hours. This platform has been validated by analysis of 35 patients known to have hepatitis…B, with 85% agreement between the test platform and analysis by commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits. The results demonstrate that the protein microarray with SPR displayed a sensitivity of 0.1 ng mL−1 for HBsAg. In addition to high sensitivity, it also shows excellent specificity, reproducibility and stability. This integrated protein microarray technique combined with SPR is a promising candidate for hepatitis B diagnosis with high-throughput.
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Keywords: Surface plasmon resonance, protein microarray, hepatitis B virus, label-free, biosensor
Abstract: In Korea, there were 224,000 new cases of cancer and 75,334 deaths caused by cancer in 2013, which was three times more than the number of death caused by heart disease, the second leading cause of death. This study proposes a biomarker positivity analysis system based on clinical data, for personalized diagnosis and therapy of cancer. Data of 78,912 cases were obtained from immunopathology and surgical pathology reports. Data on sex, age, organ, diagnosis, and biomarkers were entered into a database. To verify the reliability of the clinical data, an additional 50,450 cases from positivity-related research papers were added. The…proposed biomarker positivity analysis system makes it possible to extract and combine information for searching. The positivity values are in graphical and tabular format for ease of use. With a link to the internal network of the hospital, real-time pathology reports are available. Twenty-five pathology specialists are chosen as subjects to further confirm the reliability of this system; primary assessment results demonstrate a satisfaction level of 4.7 out of 5 and a concordance rate of 79% with positive data under the same conditions as reported in the literature. In the present study, analysis methods and platforms using large volumes of clinical and literature data are developed for cancer prognoses. It is expected that these tools will benefit both healthcare professionals and non-professionals involved in cancer diagnosis and treatment.
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Abstract: Milkvetch root as a medicine has been used for more over 2000 years in China, can strengthen immune function, protect liver, promote urination, resist aging and stress, reduce blood pressure and extensively resist bacterium. This study explored the effects of milkvetch root on the immune function of patients with a definitive diagnosis of acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The patients were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. All patients received conventional clinical therapy; those in the experimental group were also administered milkvetch root. The serum levels of cytokines including tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α…), interleukin-8 (IL-8), IL-1β , and IL-32 and immunocytes including T helper (Th), cytotoxic T (Tc), natural killer (NK), regulatory T (Treg) and B cells were measured 1 day before treatment and 7 and 14 days post-treatment. After bronchodilator inhalation, pulmonary function was evaluated at these same time points. The serum TNF-α , IL-8, IL-1β , and IL-32 levels were significantly lower in the experimental group than in the control group 14 days post-treatment. The Th/Tc ratio and NK cell ratio was significantly higher but the Treg cell ratio was significantly lower in the experimental group than in the control group. The forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) and FEV1/forced vital capacity (FVC) were significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group 14 days post-treatment. These results indicate that milkvetch root can improve the immune function of patients with acute exacerbation of COPD.
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Keywords: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, milkvetch root, immune function
Abstract: The Yinzhihuang injection, a traditional Chinese medicine, has been the recent target of increasing interest due to its anti-inflammatory properties. The molecular basis by which Yinzhihuang injection could cure Riemerella anatipestifer (RA) serositis in ducks is unclear. This study evaluated the antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects of Yinzhihuang injection, using disease models of RA-induced infectious serositis in ducks and heptane-induced inflammation in mice and rats. The duck mortality rate was reduced from 60% to 20% and both the inflammatory response and histological damage were ameliorated by treatment with Yinzhihuang injection (0.02 g/kg). Further studies indicated that superoxide dismutase (SOD),…nitric oxide synthase (NOS), and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) were elevated while malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO) and RA growth were inhibited when the ducks were treated by Yinzhihuang injection. In addition, Yinzhihuang injection (0.04 g/ml) effectively inhibited xylene-induced auricle swelling in mice, (demonstrating an inhibition rate of 35.21%), egg albumen-induced paw metatarsus swelling in rats, (demonstrating an inhibition rate of 22.30%), and agar-induced formation of granulation tissue. These results suggest that Yinzhihuang injection ameliorates RA-induced infectious serositis in ducks by modulation of inflammatory mediators and antioxidation.
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Abstract: It has been well-known for many years now that vitamin E is an essential nutrient; however, some of the physiological functions of this vitamin are still far from being understood. In recent years, a series of preclinical and clinical studies proposed a protective role of vitamin E on acute kidney injury (AKI), which has a high morbidity rate and mortality rate in clinical investigations. Based on the benefits associated with vitamin E, such as strong antioxidant function, low toxicity, rare side-effects, and low cost, this therapy strategy has garnered an extensive amount of interest in the scientific community for the…development of new therapy modes against AKI. In this review, a concise overview of the application of vitamin E in the treatment of AKI is provided as well as a summary of a series of published data regarding the combination therapy modes and detailed therapy mechanisms of vitamin E-based therapy against AKI. At present, there are critical points of this therapy mode that are still in need of further clarification, meaning the current understanding of the role of vitamin E in the treatment of AKI remains incomplete. However, the development of more reliable pharmacological or biotechnical strategies with vitamin E for the eventual treatment of patients with AKI may guide the next chapter of vitamin E research.
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Keywords: Vitamin E, acute kidney injury, antioxidant, kidney repair
Abstract: This study investigates whether Wnt components play a role in carcinogenesis, or the invasion and metastasis of salivary glands, also referred to as adenoid cystic carcinoma (sAdCC). Several sAdCC cell lines with low invasive potential (ACC-2), high metastatic potential (ACC-M), and higher invasive potential (T-ACC-M) were examined to determine whether Wnt components correlate with tumors’ invasive and metastatic behavior. Immunohistochemistry was performed in a sAdCC tissue array. ACC-M expressed higher levels of Wnt-1, beta-catenin and lower WIF-1 compared to ACC-2 (P<0.05). T-ACC-M exhibited increased mRNA of Wnt-1 and beta-catenin, and decreased WIF-1 compared to ACC-2 and ACC-M. Immuno-histochemistry showed up-regulation…of Wnt-1 and down-regulation of WIF-1 in sAdCC compared with normal salivary glands. Beta-catenin was found in the cytoplasm and nuclei of sAdCC. Dislocation of E-cadherin in sAdCC was observed. These results suggest that sAdCC exhibits diverse expressions of Wnt components. It has an important relationship with the invasive phenotype of these cells.
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Abstract: The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis in the literature that torque resistance of parkinsonian rigidity is the difference between the independent contributions of stretched and shortened muscles. The hypothesis was tested using muscle-specific stretch-shortening (MSSS) EMG ratio in this study. Nineteen patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 18 healthy subjects (the mean age comparable to that of patients) participated in this study. The EMG activity was measured in the four muscles involved in wrist joint movement, i.e. flexor carpi radialis, flexor carpi ulnaris, extensor carpi radialis and extensor carpi ulnaris. The passive flexion-extension movement with…a range of ± 30 ∘ was applied at wrist joint. Root mean squared (RMS) mean was calculated from the envelope of the EMG for each of stretching and shortening phases. MSSS EMG ratio was defined as the ratio of RMS EMG of stretching phase and RMS EMG of shortening phase of a single muscle, and it was calculated for each muscle. MSSS EMG ratios were smaller than one in all muscles. These results indicate that all wrist muscles generate greater mean EMG during shortening than during stretching. Therefore, the torque resistance of parkinsonian rigidity cannot be explained as the simple summation of independent antagonistic torque pair.
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