An in vitro comparative study on clot lysis efficiency of urokinase and reteplase with the synergy of ultrasound needle.

Objectives: Ultrasound Needle, which is an improved ultrasonic horn device, has shown great potential for promoting the diffusion of thrombolytic drugs within clots and enhancing clot lysis efficiency. However, the clot lysis efficiency of different thrombolytic drugs with the synergy of Ultrasound Needle remains unknown. In this study, we aimed to compare the lysis efficiency of the non-fibrin-specific drug urokinase and fibrin-specific drug reteplase with the synergy of Ultrasound Needle. Materials and methods: Twenty-five milliliters of human blood was incubated for 1.5 h to form in vitro clots and then received the corresponding treatment protocols: control group (normal saline), US group (10 min of Ultrasound Needle treatment), UK group (30000IU of urokinase), r-PA group (2 mg of reteplase), US + UK group, and US + r-PA group. After treatment, the morphological changes of the clots were analyzed by B-mode ultrasound imaging and hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. Lysis efficiency was evaluated based on the relative end weight (final weight/initial weight). The fibrin density of the different groups after treatment was assessed by immunofluorescence staining. Results: Morphological examination and relative end weight analysis showed that combination therapies induced a more thorough dissolution of clots compared with single therapies, and the US + r-PA group exhibited higher lysis efficiency than the US + UK group. In addition, immunofluorescence staining showed that the US + r-PA group had fewer remaining thrombus fibrins than the US + UK group after treatment. Conclusions: The Ultrasound Needle can significantly improve the clot lysis efficiency of both fibrinolytic drugs, and fibrin-specific reteplase exhibited superior lysis efficiency over non-fibrin-specific urokinase with the synergy of the Ultrasound Needle.

DPCN++: Differentiable Phase Correlation Network for Versatile Pose Registration.

Pose registration is critical in vision and robotics. This article focuses on the challenging task of initialization-free pose registration up to 7DoF for homogeneous and heterogeneous measurements. While recent learning-based methods show promise using differentiable solvers, they either rely on heuristically defined correspondences or require initialization. Phase correlation seeks solutions in the spectral domain and is correspondence-free and initialization-free. Following this, we propose a differentiable solver and combine it with simple feature extraction networks, namely DPCN++. It can perform registration for homo/hetero inputs and generalizes well on unseen objects. Specifically, the feature extraction networks first learn dense feature grids from a pair of homogeneous/heterogeneous measurements. These feature grids are then transformed into a translation and scale invariant spectrum representation based on Fourier transform and spherical radial aggregation, decoupling translation and scale from rotation. Next, the rotation, scale, and translation are independently and efficiently estimated in the spectrum step-by-step. The entire pipeline is differentiable and trained end-to-end. We evaluate DCPN++ on a wide range of tasks taking different input modalities, including 2D bird's-eye view images, 3D object and scene measurements, and medical images. Experimental results demonstrate that DCPN++ outperforms both classical and learning-based baselines, especially on partially observed and heterogeneous measurements.

KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D.

For the last few decades, several major subfields of artificial intelligence including computer vision, graphics, and robotics have progressed largely independently from each other. Recently, however, the community has realized that progress towards robust intelligent systems such as self-driving cars requires a concerted effort across the different fields. This motivated us to develop KITTI-360, successor of the popular KITTI dataset. KITTI-360 is a suburban driving dataset which comprises richer input modalities, comprehensive semantic instance annotations and accurate localization to facilitate research at the intersection of vision, graphics and robotics. For efficient annotation, we created a tool to label 3D scenes with bounding primitives and developed a model that transfers this information into the 2D image domain, resulting in over 150k images and 1B 3D points with coherent semantic instance annotations across 2D and 3D. Moreover, we established benchmarks and baselines for several tasks relevant to mobile perception, encompassing problems from computer vision, graphics, and robotics on the same dataset, e.g., semantic scene understanding, novel view synthesis and semantic SLAM. KITTI-360 will enable progress at the intersection of these research areas and thus contribute towards solving one of today's grand challenges: the development of fully autonomous self-driving systems.

A minimally invasive strategy to evacuate hematoma by synergy of an improved ultrasonic horn with urokinase: An in vitro study.

OBJECTIVES: In this study, Ultrasound Needle-an improved minimally invasive ultrasonic horn device was used to explore its potential of synergizing with urokinase in enhancing clots lysis in an in vitro intracranial hematoma model. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ten milliliter bovine blood was incubated for 3 h at 37℃, and coagulated into clot to mimic intracranial hematoma in vitro. Ultrasound Needle was an improved ultrasonic horn with a fine tip (1.80 mm) and metallic sheath, and had a frequency of 29.62 kHz. The 10,000 IU urokinase was injected through the metallic sheath during the vibration of Ultrasound Needle tip to lyse the clots for 8 min under different working parameter settings (n = 8) to explore the influence of parameters Amplitude (%) and Duty (%) on clot lysis weight (W0 ). The maximum temperatures were measured by an infrared thermometer during the treatment process. The W0 of different treatment groups (US (Ultrasound Needle), US + NS (normal saline), UK (urokinase), US + UK, n = 8) were compared to verify the synergistic lysis effect of Ultrasound Needle combined with urokinase at optimal working parameters (40% Amplitude, 20% Duty; input power 4.20 W; axial tip-vibration amplitude 69.17 µm). Clots samples after treatment were fixed overnight for macroscopic examination. And fluorescent frozen sections and scanning electron microscopy examination were performed to show microscopic changes in clots and evaluate the cavitation effect of Ultrasound Needle on promoting drug diffusion within the clots. RESULTS: The clot lysis weight W0 increased with the parameters Amplitude (%) and Duty (%), reached a peak (2.435 ± 0.137 g) at 40% Amplitude and 20% Duty (input power 4.20 W), and then decreased. Higher Amplitude (%) and Duty (%) led to higher maximum temperature, and W0 was negatively correlated with the maximum temperature after the peak (r = -0.958). At the optimal parameter setting, the maximum temperature was 33.8 ± 0.9℃, and the W0 of the US + UK group was more than four times of UK alone group (2.435 ± 0.137 g vs. 0.607 ± 0.185 g). Fluorescent frozen sections confirmed that the ultrasound energy of Ultrasound Needle could mechanically damage the clot tissues and promote the intra-clots drug diffusion. Macroscopic examination showed that US + UK group caused larger clots lysis area than UK alone group (2.08 cm2 vs. 0.65 cm2 ). In addition, electron microscopy examination exhibited that the fibrin filaments of the clots in US + UK group were lysed more thoroughly compared to single treatment groups. CONCLUSIONS: Ultrasound Needle, an improved ultrasonic horn device, can mechanically damage the clot tissues and exhibit an excellent synergistic lysis effect with thrombolytic drugs. Therefore, Ultrasound Needle has great potential in providing a new minimally invasive strategy for rapid intracranial hematoma evacuation.

Ultrasound-targeted microbubbles destruction assists dual delivery of beta-amyloid antibody and neural stem cells to restore neural function in transgenic mice of Alzheimer's disease.

OBJECTIVES: To explore the feasibility, efficacy, and safety of ultrasound-targeted microbubbles destruction (UTMD) assisted dual delivery of beta-amyloid (Aß) antibody loaded by microbubbles (MBAß ) and neural stem cells (NSCs) on Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: Twenty-seven APP/PS1 double transgenic mice (Tg mice) and 33 wild-type mice were used. Wild-type mice were insonated by diagnostic ultrasound with microbubbles (MB) for 5 min to observe the blood brain barrier (BBB) opening. The survival situation of engrafted NSCs crossing the opened BBB mediated by UTMD in Tg mice was evaluated by in vivo imaging system. We further explored the combination therapy effects of UTMD mediated Aß antibody and NSCs dual delivery. Tg mice in each group were exposed to diagnostic ultrasound for 5 min once a week for four times, with MB, MBAß , and/or NSCs administration according to groups. Cognition and memory functions were explored by Morris water maze test, Aß plaques deposition was evaluated by immunohistochemical, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and synaptophysin (SYN) expression were detected by western blot and immunofluorescence. RESULTS: BBB was opened mediated by diagnostic ultrasound with MB, and the duration of opening was about 10 h. The transplanted NSCs survived in Tg mice for no more than 72 h. Compared with control group, the Tg mice in combined delivery of NSCs and Aß antibody by UTMD group improved memory function and spatial learning with shorter latency to find the platform, longer distance traveled, and longer time spent in targeted quadrant, and more crossing times (p < 0.05). Besides, the combination delivery group promoted the clearance of Aß plaques compared with control group both in hippocampus (p < 0.01) and cortex (p < 0.05). Moreover, the expression of BDNF in combination delivery group was significantly higher than that in control group and ultrasound-mediated MB group (p < 0.05). No significant change of SYN was observed in each group. CONCLUSION: UTMD assisted dual delivery of Aß antibody and NSCs crossing the BBB into AD mice brain could help to clear Aß plaques, increase the expression of BDNF, and restore the impaired neural function. This finding may offer potential insight into treatment of AD.

The role of green innovation and tourism towards carbon neutrality in Thailand: Evidence from bootstrap ADRL approach.

The recent years have been marked by the role of green tech innovation in decreasing carbon emissions worldwide to attain the carbon neutrality target. Despite many studies examining the nexus between the former and energy consumption, tech innovation's effects on CO2 releases have not been extensively researched, and the extant empirical findings are often contradictory. Also, a major concern regarding the available literature is the scarcity of papers that scan the impact of tourism on carbon emissions, even though the industry has a high potential to affect ambient air pollution. In this case, the evidence is mixed, and no consensus among academics on the relationships between the two. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the relevance of green innovation and tourism in decreasing environmental damage in Thailand based on the bootstrapping ARDL causality model suggested by (McNown et al., 2018). This specification includes a new cointegration feature and conventional ARDL bounds tests, which increases the power of the t- and of the f-test and has several advantages, being more adequate for dynamic models with more than one explanatory variable. Our findings reveal that green innovation and tourism lead to lower environmental damage by reducing CO2 emissions, similar to foreign investments and that green tech innovation improves the environmental quality via lower carbon emissions.

Renoprotective Effect of Oridonin in a Mouse Model of Acute Kidney Injury via Suppression of Macrophage Involved Inflammation.

Ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) is the major cause of acute kidney injury (AKI). The previous studies demonstrated that Oridonin can protect kidney against IRI-induced AKI, but the underlying molecular mechanism is unclear. In this study, it showed that Oridonin significantly improved kidney damage, and inhibited the expression of interleukin (IL)-1ß, IL-6, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and MCP-1, as well as macrophage marker F4/80 in kidney and the secretion of inflammatory cytokins in serum of AKI mice in vivo. In addition, Oridonin also effectively reduced the expression and secretion of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced inflammatory factors in macrophage cell line RAW264.7 in vitro. Notably, Oridonin strongly downregulated Mincle and AKT/nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB) signaling both in vivo and in vitro, and the results of cellular recovery experiments of overexpression of Mincle in macrophage suggested that Oridonin suppressed inflammatory response of macrophage through inhibiting Mincle, which may be the underlying mechanism of Oridonin improving injury in kidney of AKI mice. In summary, the above results indicated that Oridonin can protect kidney from IRI-induced inflammation and injury by inhibiting the expression of Mincle in macrophage.

Learning Steering Kernels for Guided Depth Completion.

This paper addresses the guided depth completion task in which the goal is to predict a dense depth map given a guidance RGB image and sparse depth measurements. Recent advances on this problem nurture hopes that one day we can acquire accurate and dense depth at a very low cost. A major challenge of guided depth completion is to effectively make use of extremely sparse measurements, e.g., measurements covering less than 1% of the image pixels. In this paper, we propose a fully differentiable model that avoids convolving on sparse tensors by jointly learning depth interpolation and refinement. More specifically, we propose a differentiable kernel regression layer that interpolates the sparse depth measurements via learned kernels. We further refine the interpolated depth map using a residual depth refinement layer which leads to improved performance compared to learning absolute depth prediction using a vanilla network. We provide experimental evidence that our differentiable kernel regression layer not only enables end-to-end training from very sparse measurements using standard convolutional network architectures, but also leads to better depth interpolation results compared to existing heuristically motivated methods. We demonstrate that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art guided depth completion techniques on both NYUv2 and KITTI. We further show the generalization ability of our method with respect to the density and spatial statistics of the sparse depth measurements.

Characteristic Blood-Perfusion Reduction of Walker 256 Tumor Induced by Diagnostic Ultrasound and Microbubbles.

Tumor angiogenesis is characterized by a defective, leaky and fragile microvascular construction, and microbubble-enhanced ultrasound (MEUS) with high-pressure amplitude is capable of disrupting tumor microvasculature and arresting blood perfusion. In this study, we tried to investigate whether the blood perfusion of a malignant tumor can be characteristically interrupted by combining microbubbles and diagnostic ultrasound (US). Twenty-nine Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats with subcutaneous Walker 256 tumors and seven healthy SD rats were included. Fifteen tumors were treated by MEUS, which combined constant microbubble injection and 20 episodes of irradiation by diagnostic US (i.e., acoustic radiation force impulse [ARFI] imaging). The other 14 tumors were treated by ARFI or sham US only. Seven skeleton muscles from healthy SD rats were also treated with MEUS, serving as the control. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) was performed before and after all treatments. The blood perfusion of the tumor MEUS group showed a significant drop immediately after treatment, followed by a quick, incomplete perfusion recovery within 10-20 min. The visual perfusion scoring result was consistent with the quantitative analysis by CEUS peak intensity. However, there were no significant perfusion changes in the tumor control groups or the muscle control group. Histologic examination found severe microvascular disruption and hemorrhage in the MEUS-treated tumors but not in the control groups. Therefore, the treatment combining diagnostic US and microbubbles can specifically decrease or interrupt the blood perfusion of Walker 256 tumors, which could be a potential new imaging method for diagnosing malignant tumors.

One-step ionic liquid-based ultrasound-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography for the determination of pyrethroids in traditional Chinese medicine oral liquid preparations.

In this study, a simple one-step ionic liquid-based ultrasound-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction technique was coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography for the analysis of four pyrethroids in three kinds of traditional Chinese medicine oral liquid preparations: simotang oral liquid, kangbingdu oral liquid, and huaji oral liquid. The extraction parameters were examined to improve extraction efficiency. The optimum extraction conditions were 50 µL of 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate utilized as the extraction solvent and 800 µL of acetonitrile applied as the dispersive solvent. The extraction was assisted by ultrasonication for 8 min. The limits of detection for the four pyrethroids were within 0.007-0.024 mg L-1, and the limits of quantitation ranged between 0.023 and 0.080 mg L-1. The accuracy of the pyrethroid determination ranged from 80.1 to 106.4%. It was indicated that the proposed ionic liquid-based ultrasound-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction method had an easy operation and was accurate and environmentally friendly. This approach has potential for the analysis of pyrethroids in traditional Chinese medicine oral liquid preparations.

A Modified QuEChERS Method for Determination of Pyrethroid Residues in Traditional Chinese Medicine Oral Liquids by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography.

Pyrethroid residues in traditional Chinese medicines have been a serious threat to the health and treatment of patients. However, because of the matrix complexity of traditional Chinese medicine, the detection of pyrethroid residues remains a challenge. Therefore, we developed a QuEChERS method coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography and ultraviolet detection (HPLC-UV) for the determination of pyrethroid pesticides in three kinds of traditional Chinese medicine oral liquid preparations, and we investigated and optimized the extraction conditions. The matrix effect was estimated in the organic solvent and the actual samples by comparing the slopes of calibration curves, and the results showed that the matrix effect is not significant when using the modified QuEChERS method. The pyrethroid pesticides could be completely separated in 30 min. The linear correlation coefficients were more than 0.999, and the recoveries of all the pyrethroid pesticides ranged from 87.2% to 104.8%. The intra-day precisions (n = 5) were 2.44-4.62%, and the inter-day precisions (n = 5) were 1.06-3.02%. Moreover, the limits of detection were in the range of 0.007-0.018 ng mL-1, while the limits of quantitation were in the range of 0.022-0.057 ng mL-1. This simple, low-cost, and highly sensitive analytical method can be a potential tool for the analysis of pyrethroid residues in traditional Chinese medicine oral liquid preparations.

Recent trends in analytical methods for the determination of amino acids in biological samples.

Amino acids are widely distributed in biological fluids and involved in many biological processes, such as the synthesis of proteins, fatty acids, and ketone bodies. The altered levels of amino acids in biological fluids have been found to be closely related to several diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and cancer. Therefore, the development of analytical methods to measure amino acid concentrations in biological samples can contribute to research on the physiological actions of amino acids and the prediction, diagnosis and understanding of diseases. This review describes the analytical methods reported in 2012-2016 that utilized liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis coupled with ultraviolet, fluorescence, mass spectrometry, and electrochemical detection. Additionally, the relationship between amino acid concentrations and several diseases is also summarized.

Simultaneous Analysis of Ursolic Acid and Oleanolic Acid in Guava Leaves Using QuEChERS-Based Extraction Followed by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography.

In this paper, a novel method of QuEChERS-based extraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography has been developed for the simultaneous determination of ursolic acid (UA) and oleanolic acid (OA) in guava leaves. The QuEChERS-based extraction parameters, including the amount of added salt, vortex-assisted extraction time, and absorbent amount, and the chromatographic conditions were investigated for the analysis of UA and OA in guava leaves. Under the optimized conditions, the method showed good linearity over a range of 1-320 µg mL-1, with correlation coefficients above 0.999. The limits of detection of UA and OA were 0.18 and 0.36 µg mL-1, respectively. The intraday and interday precision were below 1.95 and 2.55%, respectively. The accuracies of the UA and OA determinations ranged from 97.4 to 111.4%. The contents of UA and OA in the guava leaf samples were 2.50 and 0.73 mg g-1, respectively. These results demonstrate that the developed method is applicable to the simultaneous determination of UA and OA in guava leaves.

Filtering Based Adaptive Visual Odometry Sensor Framework Robust to Blurred Images.

Visual odometry (VO) estimation from blurred image is a challenging problem in practical robot applications, and the blurred images will severely reduce the estimation accuracy of the VO. In this paper, we address the problem of visual odometry estimation from blurred images, and present an adaptive visual odometry estimation framework robust to blurred images. Our approach employs an objective measure of images, named small image gradient distribution (SIGD), to evaluate the blurring degree of the image, then an adaptive blurred image classification algorithm is proposed to recognize the blurred images, finally we propose an anti-blurred key-frame selection algorithm to enable the VO robust to blurred images. We also carried out varied comparable experiments to evaluate the performance of the VO algorithms with our anti-blur framework under varied blurred images, and the experimental results show that our approach can achieve superior performance comparing to the state-of-the-art methods under the condition with blurred images while not increasing too much computation cost to the original VO algorithms.

Real-time monitoring of focused ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening via subharmonic acoustic emission detection: implementation of confocal dual-frequency piezoelectric transducers.

Burst-tone focused ultrasound exposure in the presence of microbubbles has been demonstrated to be effective at inducing temporal and local opening of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which promises significant clinical potential to deliver therapeutic molecules into the central nervous system (CNS). Traditional contrast-enhanced imaging confirmation after focused ultrasound (FUS) exposure serves as a post-operative indicator of the effectiveness of FUS-BBB opening, however, an indicator that can concurrently report the BBB status and BBB-opening effectiveness is required to provide effective feedback to implement this treatment clinically. In this study, we demonstrate the use of subharmonic acoustic emission detection with implementation on a confocal dual-frequency piezoelectric ceramic structure to perform real-time monitoring of FUS-BBB opening. A confocal dual-frequency (0.55 MHz/1.1 MHz) focused ultrasound transducer was designed. The 1.1 MHz spherically-curved ceramic was employed to deliver FUS exposure to induce BBB-opening, whereas the outer-ring 0.55 MHz ceramic was employed to detect the subharmonic acoustic emissions originating from the target position. In stage-1 experiments, we employed spectral analysis and performed an energy spectrum density (ESD) calculation. An optimized 0.55 MHz ESD level change was shown to effectively discriminate the occurrence of BBB-opening. Wideband acoustic emissions received from 0.55 MHz ceramics were also analyzed to evaluate its correlations with erythrocyte extravasations. In stage-2 real-time monitoring experiments, we applied the predetermined ESD change as a detection threshold in PC-controlled algorithm to predict the FUS exposure intra-operatively. In stage-1 experiment, we showed that subharmonic ESD presents distinguishable dynamics between intact BBB and opened BBB, and therefore a threshold ESD change level (5.5 dB) can be identified for BBB-opening prediction. Using this ESD change threshold detection as a surrogate to on/off control the FUS exposure in stage-2 experiments, we demonstrated both excellent sensitivity (92%) and specificity (92.3%) in discriminating BBB-opening occurrence can be obtained in animal treatments, while concurrently achieving a high positive predicted value (95.8%). Wideband ESD was also highly correlated with the occurrence and level of erythrocyte extravasations (r (2) = 0.81). The proposed system configuration and corresponding analysis based on subharmonic acoustic emissions has the potential to be implemented as a real-time feedback control structure for reliable indication of intact FUS-BBB opening for CNS brain drug delivery.