Urban noise exposure assessment based on principal component analysis of points of interest.

Accurate qualitative and quantitative information on the characteristics of traffic noise exposure in densely populated urban areas is an important prerequisite for reasonable traffic noise control. The primary objective of this study is the development and application of a traffic noise exposure evaluation method based on points of interest (POIs). First, an automatic query arithmetic is used to acquire geospatial information, POIs data, building and network information from the webmap. Second, the attribute matrix of preprocessed POIs for the population is constructed. And the population distribution is obtained by principal component analysis (PCA) of POIs and Gaussian decomposition of demographic data. Then, the modified traffic noise line-source model is applied to calculate the noise distribution considering attenuation among buildings based on measured traffic flow parameters. Finally, with the help of the proposed noise evaluation indicators, and considering the noise function requirements (NFRs, which can be divided into four classes according to different area land-use types), traffic noise evaluation is realized. The proposed method is applied to a typical region with four NFR classes. It is concluded that the characteristics of traffic noise exposure are affected by traffic conditions, buildings, NFR classes and population distribution. And the crowds exposed to noise present aggregation effects, which are usually centered around specific buildings. In addition, POI types which people actives related suffer more serious noise exposure, and exposure is overestimated at low requirement regions without considering crowd distribution of the setting scenario.

Review on the protective activity of osthole against the pathogenesis of osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis (OP), characterized by continuous bone loss and increased fracture risk, has posed a challenge to patients and society. Long-term administration of current pharmacological agents may cause severe side effects. Traditional medicines, acting as alternative agents, show promise in treating OP. Osthole, a natural coumarin derivative separated from Cnidium monnieri (L.) Cusson and Angelica pubescens Maxim. f., exhibits protective effects against the pathological development of OP. Osthole increases osteoblast-related bone formation and decreases osteoclast-related bone resorption, suppressing OP-related fragility fracture. In addition, the metabolites of osthole may exhibit pharmacological effectiveness against OP development. Mechanically, osthole promotes osteogenic differentiation by activating the Wnt/ß-catenin and BMP-2/Smad1/5/8 signaling pathways and suppresses RANKL-induced osteoclastogenesis and osteoclast activity. Thus, osthole may become a promising agent to protect against OP development. However, more studies should be performed due to, at least in part, the uncertainty of drug targets. Further pharmacological investigation of osthole in OP treatment might lead to the development of potential drug candidates.

Protective effects of ginseng and ginsenosides in the development of osteoarthritis (Review).

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic inflammatory joint disease. Traditional chinese medicine provides a resource for drug screening for OA treatment. Ginseng and the associated bioactive compound, ginsenosides, may reduce inflammation, which is considered a risk factor for the development of OA. Specifically, ginsenosides may exhibit anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative stress activities, and inhibit extracellular matrix degradation by suppressing the NF-κB and MAPK signaling pathways. Notably, specific ginsenosides, such as compound K and Rk1, may physically interact with IκB kinase and inhibit the associated phosphorylation. Thus, ginsenosides exhibit potential as therapeutic candidates in the management of OA. However, the low water solubility limits the clinical applications of ginsenosides. Numerous effective strategies have been explored to improve bioavailability; however, further investigations are still required.

Geniposide suppressed OX-LDL-induced osteoblast apoptosis by regulating the NRF2/NF-κB signaling pathway.

BACKGROUND: Osteoporosis (OP), due to microarchitectural alterations, is associated with decreased bone mass, declined strength, and increased fracture risk. Increased osteoblast apoptosis contributes to the progression of OP. Natural compounds from herbs provide a rich resource for drug screening. Our previous investigation showed that geniposide (GEN), an effective compound from Eucommia ulmoides, could protect against the pathological development of OP induced by cholesterol accumulation. METHODS: The rat OP models were duplicated. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, hematoxylin and eosin staining, and immunohistochemistry were used to evaluate bone changes. TUNEL/DAPI staining assays were used for cell apoptosis detection. Protein expression was determined by western blotting assays. RESULTS: A high-fat diet promoted OP development in vivo, and OX-LDL stimulated osteoblast apoptosis in vitro. GEN exhibited protective activities against OX-LDL-induced osteoblast apoptosis by increasing the NRF2 pathway and decreasing the NF-κB pathway. PDTC, an NF-κB inhibitor, could further promote the biological functions of GEN. In contrast, ML385, an NRF2 inhibitor, might eliminate GEN's protection. CONCLUSION: GEN suppressed OX-LDL-induced osteoblast apoptosis by regulating the NRF2/NF-κB signaling pathway.

The potential roles of JAK/STAT signaling in the progression of osteoarthritis.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is an age-related chronic progressive degenerative disease that induces persistent pain and disabilities. The development of OA is a complex process, and the risk factors are various, including aging, genetics, trauma and altered biomechanics. Inflammation and immunity play an important role in the pathogenesis of OA. JAK/STAT pathway is one of the most prominent intracellular signaling pathways, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. Inflammatory factors can act as the initiators of JAK/STAT pathway, which is implicated in the pathophysiological activity of chondrocyte. In this article, we provide a review on the importance of JAK/STAT pathway in the pathological development of OA. Potentially, JAK/STAT pathway becomes a therapeutic target for managing OA.

Adjuvant Therapy System of COVID-19 Patient: Integrating Warning, Therapy, Post-Therapy Psychological Intervention.

The 2019 novel coronavirus(COVID-19) spreads rapidly, and the large-scale infection leads to the lack of medical resources. For the purpose of providing more reasonable medical service to COVID-19 patients, we designed an novel adjuvant therapy system integrating warning, therapy, and post-therapy psychological intervention. The system combines data analysis, communication networks and artificial intelligence(AI) to design a guidance framework for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Specifically, in this system, we first can use blood characteristic data to help make a definite diagnosis and classify the patients. Then, the classification results, together with the blood characteristics and underlying diseases disease characteristics of the patient, can be used to assist the doctor in treat treating the patient according to AI algorithms. Moreover, after the patient is discharged from the hospital, the system can monitor the psychological and physiological state at the data collection layer. And in the data feedback layer, this system can analyze the data and report the abnormalities of the patient to the doctor through communication network. Experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed system.

Apoptosis of endplate chondrocytes in cervical kyphosis is associated with chronic forward flexed neck: an in vivo rat bipedal walking model.

BACKGROUND: This study was undertaken to establish a rat bipedal walking model of cervical kyphosis (CK) associated with chronic forward flexed neck and assess the effects of chronic forward flexed neck on endplate chondrocytes. METHODS: Forty-eight 1-month-old Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into 3 groups: forward flexed neck group (n = 16), bipedal group (n = 16), and normal group (n = 16). Cervical curves were analyzed on a lateral cervical spine X-ray using Harrison's posterior tangent method before the experiment and at 2-week intervals for a 6-week period. Histologic changes in cartilaginous endplate chondrocytes were observed using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and terminal deoxyribonucleotidyl transferase (TdT)-mediated dUTP nick-end labeling. RESULTS: Radiographic findings suggested a significantly decreased cervical physiological curvature in the forward flexed neck group over the 6-week follow-up; normal cervical curves were maintained in other groups. The average cervical curvature (C2-C7) was - 7.6 ± 0.9° in the forward flexed neck group before the experiment, - 3.9 ± 0.8° at 2 weeks post-experiment, 10.7 ± 1.0° at 4 weeks post-experiment, and 20.5 ± 2.1° at the last follow-up post-experiment. Histologically, results of H&E staining unveiled that cartilaginous endplate chondrocytes were arranged in an irregular fashion, with the decreased number at the observation period; the incidence of apoptotic cells in the forward flexed neck group was noticeably higher at the 6-week follow-up than that in other groups. CONCLUSIONS: CK developed as the result of chronic forward flexed neck. Histologic changes suggested that chondrocyte apoptosis may play a critical role in the development of cervical kyphotic deformity associated with chronic forward flexed neck.

Development and validation of psychological status questionnaire for parents of infantile hemangiomas.

BACKGROUND: Infantile hemangioma (IH) is the most frequent benign tumor of infancy which impacts the psychological status of parents of affected children. Parental psychological status has a significant effect on the therapeutic effect and long-term prognosis of IH children. However, no standard questionnaires had been established previously to assess the psychological status of Chinese parents of children with IH. METHODS: This study prospectively developed and validated a psychological status instrument for the assessment of parents of patients with IH and to identify clinical features with effects on the psychological status. A total of 350 parents completed the 35-item Psychologic Status Questionnaire for parents of Infantile Hemangiomas (IH-PSQ) and provided demographic information. The IH-PSQ was refined via item analysis, validity analysis (including exploratory factor analysis and criterion-related validity) and reliability analysis (including internal consistency reliability, split half reliability, and test-retest reliability). RESULTS: The dimensionality of the items was evaluated using factor analysis, with results suggesting 5 factors: anxiety, depression, psychological imbalance, disease shame, and disease fear. The final instrument consists of 4 scales with a total of 23 items. Construct validity was demonstrated and IH-PSQ showed good internal coherence (Cronbach's α: 0.957), good split half reliability (0.971), and good test-retest reliability (correlation coefficient: 0.967). The correlation coefficient between the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) of children with IH was 0.874 and 0.754, respectively. Multiple linear regression analysis found that some characteristics will affect the score of IH-PSQ. CONCLUSIONS: The IH-PSQ contains 5 dimensions and 23 entries, and with good reliability and validity, can objectively and effectively evaluate the psychological status of IH parents. Certain clinical characteristics of IH families, including parents' own factors (including their monthly income and cultural level) and disease-related factors of affected children (including the duration of illness, tumor size, with or without complications, single or multiple, whether being treated or not), were associated with a greater impact on IH-PSQ.

DaNet: dose-aware network embedded with dose-level estimation for low-dose CT imaging.

Many deep learning (DL)-based image restoration methods for low-dose CT (LDCT) problems directly employ the end-to-end networks on low-dose training data without considering dose differences. However, the radiation dose difference has a great impact on the ultimate results, and lower doses increase the difficulty of restoration. Moreover, there is increasing demand to design and estimate acceptable scanning doses for patients in clinical practice, necessitating dose-aware networks embedded with adaptive dose estimation. In this paper, we consider these dose differences of input LDCT images and propose an adaptive dose-aware network. First, considering a large dose distribution range for simulation convenience, we coarsely define five dose levels in advance as lowest, lower, mild, higher and highest radiation dose levels. Instead of directly building the end-to-end mapping function between LDCT images and high-dose CT counterparts, the dose level is primarily estimated in the first stage. In the second stage, the adaptively learned low-dose level is used to guide the image restoration process as the pattern of prior information through the channel feature transform. We conduct experiments on a simulated dataset based on original high dose parts of American Association of Physicists in Medicine challenge datasets from the Mayo Clinic. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the dose-level estimation, and the experimental results show that our method is superior to several other DL-based methods. Specifically, our method provides obviously better performance in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality reflected in subjective scores. Due to the dual-stage process, our method may suffer limitations under more parameters and coarse dose-level definitions, and thus, further improvements in clinical practical applications with different CT equipment vendors are planned in future work.

MicroRNA-142 protects MC3T3-E1 cells against high glucose-induced apoptosis by targeting ß-catenin.

Osteoporosis, characterized by decreased mineral density and bone mass, is triggered by various detrimental factors and often causes further complications, including fractures. Aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRs) has been associated with the pathogenesis of osteoporosis. Recently, miR-142 was reported to be downregulated in osteoblasts; however, the underlying mechanism of miR-142 in mediating the development of osteoporosis remains unclear. In the present study, high glucose induced the downregulation of miR-142 mRNA expression and promoted the apoptosis of MC3T3-E1 cells. miR-142-mimics significantly protected against high glucose-induced apoptosis, upregulated the expression levels of B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) and downregulated the protein expression levels of ß-catenin, Bcl-2 associated X (Bax) and caspase-3. Furthermore, ß-catenin was identified as a direct target of miR-142 using luciferase reporter assays. Similar to the effects of miR-142 inhibitors, overexpression of ß-catenin aggravated the apoptosis of MC3T3-E1 cells, as demonstrated by the upregulation of Bax and caspase-3, and the downregulation of Bcl-2 expression levels. In conclusion, miR-142 protects MC3T3-E1 cells against high glucose-induced apoptosis by targeting ß-catenin.

microRNA­96 regulates the proliferation of nucleus pulposus cells by targeting ARID2/AKT signaling.

The aberrant proliferation of nucleus pulposus (NP) cells has been reported to be implicated in the pathogenesis of intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD). Previous studies have demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs), which are a group of small noncoding RNAs, are critical regulators of cell proliferation in various pathologies. However, the role of miRNA­96 (miR­96) in the proliferation of NP cells remains to be determined. In the present study, reverse transcription­quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to investigate the expression of miR­96 in NP tissues from patients with IDD and healthy tissues from patients with traumatic lumbar fracture as the control. A dual­luciferase reporter assay was used to investigate whether AT­rich interaction domain 2 (ARID2) may be a direct target gene for miR­96. Furthermore, isolated NP cells from patients with IDD were transfected with miR­96 mimics and ARID2­targeting small interfering RNAs; cell proliferation, and the protein expression of Akt, phosphorylated Akt and ARID2 were examined, whereas the effects of an Akt inhibitor on NP cell proliferation were also evaluated. The present results demonstrated that miR­96 expression was significantly upregulated in IDD samples, and the level of miR­96 expression was positively associated with disc degeneration grade, which was evaluated by a modified Pfirrmann grading system. In addition, the current study identified ARID2 as a direct gene target of miR­96. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that ARID2 mRNA expression was inversely correlated with the expression of miR­96 in NP tissues. In addition, miR­96 overexpression promoted NP cell proliferation and induced Akt phosphorylation, which led to increased cyclin D1 translation. Notably, overexpression of ARID2 or treatment with an Akt inhibitor decreased the effect of miR­96 on NP cell proliferation. In conclusion, the results of the present study indicate that miR­96 may promote the proliferation of human degenerated NP cells by targeting ARID2 via activation of the Akt pathway, and potentially serves as a therapeutic target for IDD.

[A multicenter randomized controlled clinical trial of Ligation of the Intersphincteric Fistula Tract Plus Bioprosthetic Anal Fistula Plug in the treatment of chronic anal fistula].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Ligation of the Intersphincteric Fistula Tract Plus Bioprosthetic Anal Fistula Plug (LIFT-plug) in the treatment of chronic anal fistula. METHODS: A total of 239 patients (199 males, 40 females) with chronic anal fistula were recruited from 5 hospitals between March 2011 and April 2013. These patients were randomly assigned to the experimental group (n=119) treated with LIFT-plug or the control group (n=120) treated with LIFT. The follow-up period was 180 days. The collected data included healing rate, the median healing time, the recurrence rate, the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), the incontinence rate, and the safety indicators associated with the anal fistula plug. RESULTS: The healing rate of the experimental group was better than the control group (96.5% vs 83.7%, P<0.05). The median healing time of the experimental group was 22 days and the latter was 30 days (P<0.05). By the end of the follow-up period, there was no recurrence found in the two groups. The VAS and the incontinence rate had no statistically significant difference between the two groups. There were no adverse events associated with the anal fistula plug in the experimental group. CONCLUSION: LIFT-plug is simple, less invasive, and with shorter healing time and more satisfactory healing rate in treating chronic anal fistula compared with LIFT.

Pyogenic liver abscess as initial presentation in locally advanced right colon cancer invading the liver, gallbladder, and duodenum.

Locally advanced colorectal cancer complicated with adjacent organic invasion may remain confined to the local area with minimal metastasis. In the present paper, we report on a patient with advanced right colon cancer, including liver, gallbladder, and duodenal invasion behind the scene of liver abscess. En bloc resection was performed on the patient, with right-hemicolectomy, cholecystectomy, partial duodental resection, and hepatectomy. Postoperative management was administered, including nutritional support in the early postoperative period, effective anti-infection treatment, and adjuvant chemotherapy (FOLFOX4). The patient survived for 16 months after the operation. Common clinical manifestations of colorectal cancer were digestive symptoms and changes in defecation. However, the clinical manifestation of locally advanced colon cancer was extremely complicated. Extended or multivisceral resection may offer patients a chance to survive an acute crisis and allow for treatment with adjuvant therapy.