Identification and vitro verification of the potential drug targets of active ingredients of Chonglou in the treatment of lung adenocarcinoma based on EMT-related genes.

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the main histological type of lung cancer with an unfavorable survival rate. Metastasis is the leading LUAD-related death with Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) playing an essential role. The anticancer efficacies of the active ingredients in Chonglou have been widely reported in various cancers. However, the potential therapeutic targets of the Chonglou active ingredients in LUAD patients remain unknown. Here, the network pharmacology and bioinformatics were performed to analyze the associations of the clinical characteristics, immune infiltration factors and m6A-related genes with the EMT-related genes associated with LUAD (EMT-LUAD related genes), and the molecular docking, STRING, GO, and KEGG enrichment for the drug targets of Chonglou active ingredients associated with EMT (EMT-LUAD-Chonglou related genes). And, cell viability analysis and cell invasion and infiltration analysis were used to confirm the theoretical basis of this study. A total of 166 EMT-LUAD related genes were identified and a multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression model with a favorable predictive accuracy was constructed. Meanwhile, the immune cell infiltration, immune cell subsets, checkpoint inhibitors and the expression of m6A-related genes were significantly associated with the risk scores for EMT-LUAD related genes with independent significant prognostic value of all included LUAD patients. Furthermore, 12 EMT-LUAD-Chonglou related genes with five core drug targets were identified, which participated in LUAD development through extracellular matrix disassembly, collagen metabolic process, collagen catabolic process, extracellular matrix organization, extracellular structure organization and inflammatory response. Moreover, we found that the active ingredients of Chonglou could indeed inhibit the progression of lung adenocarcinoma cells. These results are oriented towards EMT-related genes to achieve a better understanding of the role of Chonglou and its targets in osteosarcoma development and metastasis, thus guiding future preclinical studies and facilitating clinical translation of LUAD treatment.

SAI-YOLO: A Lightweight Network for Real-Time Detection of Driver Mask-Wearing Specification on Resource-Constrained Devices.

Frequent occurrence and long-term existence of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 and influenza require bus drivers to wear masks correctly during driving. To quickly detect whether the mask is worn correctly on resource-constrained devices, a lightweight target detection network SAI-YOLO is proposed. Based on YOLOv4-Tiny, the network incorporates the Inception V3 structure, replaces two CSPBlock modules with the RES-SEBlock modules to reduce the number of parameters and computational difficulty, and adds a convolutional block attention module and a squeeze-and-excitation module to extract key feature information. Moreover, a modified ReLU (M-ReLU) activation function is introduced to replace the original Leaky_ReLU function. The experimental results show that SAI-YOLO reduces the number of network parameters and calculation difficulty and improves the detection speed of the network while maintaining certain recognition accuracy. The mean average precision (mAP) for face-mask-wearing detection reaches 86% and the average precision (AP) for mask-wearing normative detection reaches 88%. In the resource-constrained device Raspberry Pi 4B, the average detection time after acceleration is 197 ms, which meets the actual application requirements.

Clinical characteristics of refractory COVID-19 pneumonia in Wuhan, China ;Clinical Infectious Diseases ;Oxford Academic

Background Since December 2019, novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)-infected pneumonia (COVID-19) occurred in Wuhan, and rapidly spread throughout China. This study aimed to clarify the characteristics of patients with refractory COVID-19. Methods In this retrospective single-center study, we included 155 consecutive patients with confirmed COVID-19 in Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University from January 1st to February 5th. The cases were divided into general and refractory COVID-19 groups according to the clinical efficacy after hospitalization, and the difference between groups were compared. Results Compared with general COVID-19 patients (45.2%), refractory patients had an older age, male sex, more underlying comorbidities, lower incidence of fever, higher levels of maximum temperature among fever cases, higher incidence of breath shortness and anorexia, severer disease assessment on admission, high levels of neutrophil, aspartate aminotransferase (AST), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and C-reactive protein, lower levels of platelets and albumin, and higher incidence of bilateral pneumonia and pleural effusion (P<0.05). Refractory COVID-19 patients were more likely to receive oxygen, mechanical ventilation, expectorant, and adjunctive treatment including corticosteroid, antiviral drugs and immune enhancer (P<0.05). After adjustment, those with refractory COVID-19 were also more likely to have a male sex and manifestations of anorexia and fever on admission, and receive oxygen, expectorant and adjunctive agents (P<0.05) when considering the factors of disease severity on admission, mechanical ventilation, and ICU transfer. Conclusion Nearly 50% COVID-19 patients could not reach obvious clinical and radiological remission within 10 days after hospitalization. The patients with male sex, anorexia and no fever on admission predicted poor efficacy.