Research of accommodative microfluctuations caused by visual fatigue based on liquid crystal and laser displays.

Different levels of visual fatigue in the human eye depend on different color-formation methods and image quality. This paper uses the high-frequency component of the spectral power of accommodative microfluctuations as a major objective indicator for analyzing the effects of visual fatigue based on various displays, such as color-formation displays and 3D displays. Also, a questionnaire is used as a subjective indicator. The results are that 3D videos cause greater visual fatigue than 2D videos (p<0.001), the shutter-type 3D display causes visual fatigue more than the polarized type (p=0.012), the display of the time-sharing method causes greater visual fatigue than the spatial-formation method (p=0.008), and there is no significance between various light source modules of displays (p=0.162). In general, people with normal color discrimination have more visual fatigue than those with good color discrimination (p<0.001). Therefore, this paper uses the high-frequency component of accommodative microfluctuations to evaluate the physiological stress or strain by overexerting the visual system, and can compare the level of visual fatigue between various displays.

Puerarin protects against Staphylococcus aureus-induced injury of human alveolar epithelial A549 cells via downregulating alpha-hemolysin secretion.

Alpha-hemolysin, a secreted pore-forming toxin, plays an indispensable role in the pathogenicity of Staphylococcus aureus. In this study, the antimicrobial activity of puerarin against S. aureus was investigated; as a result, puerarin showed no influence on the growth of this organism. However, hemolysis and western blotting assays showed that puerarin concentration dependently inhibited the secretion of alpha-hemolysin at low concentrations. Real-time RT-PCR assay was further employed to evaluate the transcriptional level of hla, the gene encoding alpha-hemolysin, and RNAIII, an effector molecule of the agr system. The results indicated that the RNAIII expression and subsequent hla transcription were also inhibited by puerarin in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, puerarin significantly prevented human alveolar epithelial A549 cells from S. aureus-induced injury. Thereby, puerarin may be considered as a potential candidate for the development of antivirulence drugs in the treatment of S. aureus-mediated infections.

Nonlinear analysis of movement-related changes in human subthalamic local field potentials.

Movement-related changes such as event-related desynchronizationcan (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) can be found in human subthalamic nucleus (STN) with analysis on local field potentials (LFP) recorded from Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Besides traditional time-frequency (TF) analysis, we introduced nonlinear analysis, bispectral and approximate entropy (ApEn), to measure the signal nonlinear correlation and regularity in neural activities. Movement-related changes were found in the beta band, bicoherence and ApEn, and variation during stationary movement is more available by nonlinear methods. Therefore, we suggest nonlinear analysis for further related studies.