ABSTRACT
In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), accurate 3D hand pose and mesh estimation hold critical importance. However, inferring reasonable and accurate poses in severe self-occlusion and high self-similarity remains an inherent challenge. In order to alleviate the ambiguity caused by invisible and similar joints during HRI, we propose a new Topology-aware Transformer network named HandGCNFormer with depth image as input, incorporating prior knowledge of hand kinematic topology into the network while modeling long-range contextual information. Specifically, we propose a novel Graphformer decoder with an additional Node-offset Graph Convolutional layer (NoffGConv). The Graphformer decoder optimizes the synergy between the Transformer and GCN, capturing long-range dependencies and local topological connections between joints. On top of that, we replace the standard MLP prediction head with a novel Topology-aware head to better exploit local topological constraints for more reasonable and accurate poses. Our method achieves state-of-the-art 3D hand pose estimation performance on four challenging datasets, including Hands2017, NYU, ICVL, and MSRA. To further demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed Graphformer Decoder and Topology aware head, we extend our framework to HandGCNFormer-Mesh for the 3D hand mesh estimation task. The extended framework efficiently integrates a shape regressor with the original Graphformer Decoder and Topology aware head, producing Mano parameters. The results on the HO-3D dataset, which contains various and challenging occlusions, show that our HandGCNFormer-Mesh achieves competitive results compared to previous state-of-the-art 3D hand mesh estimation methods.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Wenzhou has achieved great progress in the prevention and control of the growing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an indispensable role in this fight. This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of Maxingshigan-Weijing decoction (MWD) in treating infected patients. METHODS: This study was an open-label randomized controlled trial. Inpatients with mild or moderate symptoms caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection were randomly treated with routine supportive care alone or a combination of routine supportive care and MWD. The primary outcome was the rate of symptom (fever, fatigue, cough and difficulty breathing) recovery. RESULTS: Fifty-nine inpatients were enrolled, of whom 29 received routine supportive care alone (control group) and 30 received combination therapy (treatment group). The rate of symptom recovery was significantly higher in the treatment group than in the control group. The time to recovery of fever (3 vs. 7 days), fatigue (9 vs. 12 days), coughing (9 vs. 14 days) and difficulty breathing (4.5 vs. 9.5 days) was also significantly shorter in the treatment group (all p < 0.001). The syndrome score was lower after MWD treatment. However, neither group differed in the viral assay findings, hospitalization days, medication time or the rate of conversion to severe cases. CONCLUSIONS: MWD increased the rate of symptom recovery and shortened the time to recovery of clinical symptoms without deterioration to death or critical care. These findings may provide opportunities for the use of complementary medicine in treating this infection. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR2000030759.
ABSTRACT
Marsupenaeus japonicus is a shrimp species of great value in the Chinese aquaculture industry. Given the susceptibility to viral diseases, research efforts have focused on the molecular characteristics of the shrimp's immune mechanisms. Ferritin is well known for its iron storage function, but studies have also addressed its immune function in response to pathogens. In this study, an M. japonicus ferritin cDNA was identified by homology cloning and rapid amplification of cDNA ends-PCR. The full-length cDNA is 1244 bp long and contains an open reading frame (513 bp) that encodes a highly conserved protein of 170 amino acids. Quantitative real-time PCR detection of ferritin revealed high expression in eight tested tissues, with the highest levels in hemocytes-consistent with the iron storage capacity of ferritin. We infected M. japonicus with white spot syndrome virus and validated the model by viral copy analysis and histopathology, which demonstrated an increase in viral copies along with acute degeneration of tissues. Transcripts of ferritin increased by 3.1-fold, 2.1-fold, and 1.5-fold in the hepatopancreas, gill, and midgut at 24h post-injection, suggesting that ferritin played an important role in the immune response of M. japonicus.
