Epidemiological characteristics of pulmonary tuberculosis in Ningbo Cityfrom 2011 to 2020 / 预防医学

Objective@#To investigate the epidemiological characteristics of pulmonary tuberculosis in Ningbo City from 2011 to 2020, so as to provide the evidence for developing the control measures of pulmonary tuberculosis.@*Methods@#The data pertaining to pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Ningbo City from 2011 to 2020 were collected from the Tuberculosis Management Information System of the Chinese Disease Control and Prevention Information System. The temporal distribution, population distribution, regional distribution and case report by hospitals were descriptively analyzed.@*Results@#Totally 38 305 pulmonary tuberculosis cases were reported in Ningbo City from 2011 to 2020, with an incidence rate of 48.71/105. The incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis appeared a tendency towards a decline ( P<0.05 ), with an annual reduction rate of 5.29%. There were 15 784 smear-positive cases ( 41.21% ), and the proportion of smear-positive cases appeared a tendency towards a reduction from 2011 to 2015 ( P<0.05 ), and a rise from 2016 to 2020 ( P<0.05 ). The number of reported pulmonary tuberculosis cases peaked from March to May (10 973 cases, 28.65%), and a higher incidence rate of pulmonary tuberculosis was found in men than in women ( 64.55/105 vs. 32.20/105, P<0.05 ). The highest incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis was found in cases at ages of 15 to 25 years ( 72.93/105 ), followed by in cases at ages of 65 years and greater ( 69.97/105 ), and farmers were the predominant occupation among the pulmonary tuberculosis patients ( 12 279 cases, 32.06% ). During the period from 2011 to 2020, pulmonary tuberculosis cases were reported across the 10 districts or counties of Ningbo City, and the top three high incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis were seen in Yinzhou District ( 59.91/105 ), Fenghua District ( 56.19/105 ) and Beilun District ( 56.01/105 ). The proportion of pulmonary tuberculosis cases reported by designated pulmonary tuberculosis hospitals increased from 72.16% in 2011 to 99.74% in 2020 in Ningbo City.@*Conclusions@#The incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis appeared a tendency towards a decline in Ningbo City from 2011 to 2020, and the annual decline rate meets the requirements of the WHO strategic goal of ending pulmonary tuberculosis; however, the control measures for pulmonary tuberculosis require to be intensified among men, youths, and farmers.

Spatio-temporal clustering analysis of pulmonary tuberculosis in Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020 / 预防医学

Objective@#To investigate the spatio-temporal distribution characteristics of pulmonary tuberculosis in Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020, so as to provide insights into tuberculosis control.@*Methods@#The data of pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020 were collected from Tuberculosis Management Information System of China Disease Control and Prevention Information System, and were linked with the geographic information database of Ningbo Planning Design and Research Institute. The software SaTScan version 10.3 was employed for monthly spatio-temporal scanning and cluster analysis of reported pulmonary tuberculosis cases, populations, longitude and latitude in 153 townships of Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020. @*Results@#There were one class Ⅰ cluster and two class Ⅱ clusters of pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020, and the class Ⅰ cluster was centered in Song'ao Township and covered 37 townships, with aggregation time from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2017, while class Ⅱ clusters were covered 38 tounships which were centered in Sanqishi Township of Yuyao County, and one township in Hangzhou Bay New Town. The aggregation time was from January to June in 2015 and 2016, from March to August between 2017 and 2019 and between May and October, 2020. The overall reported incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis appeared a tendency towards a decline in each township of Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020; however, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis was more than 80 per 100 thousand in Fuming Township of Yinzhou District and Juexi Township of Xiangshan County in 2020.@*Conclusions@#There were significant spatio-temporal clustering characteristics of pulmonary tuberculosis incidence at a township level in Ningbo City from 2015 to 2020, and the clusters were mainly concentrated in the central and eastern Ningbo City. The reported incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis is high in Fuming Township of Yinzhou District and Juexi Township of Xiangshan County, where targeted regional tuberculosis control strategies should be implemented.

Piperazine ferulate exerts antihypertensive effect and improves endothelial function in vitro and in vivo via the activation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase.

To investigate the effect of piperazine ferulate (PF) on hypertension and endothelial function, and to assess the possible underlying mechanism. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC), adult male Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rats aged 12 to 14 weeks, and spontaneously hypertensive (SH) and Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were used for this study. Cell viability, activities of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1), in vivo NO synthesis, arterial systolic blood pressure, vascular function, expressions of endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) and phosphorylated-eNOS (p-eNOS) were determined or assessed as appropriate. The results of MTT assay showed the number of viable cells were significantly increased with increase in PF concentration (p < 0.05). The level of expression of ACE was significantly reduced with increase in PF concentration (p < 0.05), while the level of HO-1 expression significantly increased (p < 0.05). Results of DAF-FM fluorescent staining showed that the amounts of NO synthesized in vivo was significantly higher in aortic rings of SH and SD rats treated with PF than in the corresponding control groups (p < 0.05). Treatment with PF in vivo significantly improved impaired acetylcholine-induced aortic relaxation in SH rats. Total eNOS expression was significantly increased after treatment with PF (p < 0.05). The expressions of total eNOS and p-eNOS in both groups were not affected by PF when compared to the control group. These results indicate that PF exerts antihypertensive effect and improves endothelial function in vitro and in vivo via the activation of eNOS.

STC: A Simple to Complex Framework for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation.

Recently, significant improvement has been made on semantic object segmentation due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Training such a DCNN usually relies on a large number of images with pixel-level segmentation masks, and annotating these images is very costly in terms of both finance and human effort. In this paper, we propose a simple to complex (STC) framework in which only image-level annotations are utilized to learn DCNNs for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first train an initial segmentation network called Initial-DCNN with the saliency maps of simple images (i.e., those with a single category of major object(s) and clean background). These saliency maps can be automatically obtained by existing bottom-up salient object detection techniques, where no supervision information is needed. Then, a better network called Enhanced-DCNN is learned with supervision from the predicted segmentation masks of simple images based on the Initial-DCNN as well as the image-level annotations. Finally, more pixel-level segmentation masks of complex images (two or more categories of objects with cluttered background), which are inferred by using Enhanced-DCNN and image-level annotations, are utilized as the supervision information to learn the Powerful-DCNN for semantic segmentation. Our method utilizes 40K simple images from Flickr.com and 10K complex images from PASCAL VOC for step-wisely boosting the segmentation network. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed STC framework compared with other state-of-the-arts.

Learning to Segment Human by Watching YouTube.

An intuition on human segmentation is that when a human is moving in a video, the video-context (e.g., appearance and motion clues) may potentially infer reasonable mask information for the whole human body. Inspired by this, based on popular deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), we explore a very-weakly supervised learning framework for human segmentation task, where only an imperfect human detector is available along with massive weakly-labeled YouTube videos. In our solution, the video-context guided human mask inference and CNN based segmentation network learning iterate to mutually enhance each other until no further improvement gains. In the first step, each video is decomposed into supervoxels by the unsupervised video segmentation. The superpixels within the supervoxels are then classified as human or non-human by graph optimization with unary energies from the imperfect human detection results and the predicted confidence maps by the CNN trained in the previous iteration. In the second step, the video-context derived human masks are used as direct labels to train CNN. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark demonstrate that the proposed framework has already achieved superior results than all previous weakly-supervised methods with object class or bounding box annotations. In addition, by augmenting with the annotated masks from PASCAL VOC 2012, our method reaches a new state-of-the-art performance on the human segmentation task.

Study on the Quinolone Antibiotic Resistance and Its Relative Genes in Campylobacter Jejuni / 现代检验医学杂志

Objective To establish a real-time fluorescence PCR method to detect the drug resistance genes of pathogenic Campylobacter jejunum in human stool samples,and investigate the relationship between quinoloneantibiotic resistance and the related genes in Campylobacter jejuni .Methods According to the gyrA and gyrB gene sequences that related with the fluoroquinolone resistance in Campylobacter jejuni ,the primers of the PCR method was designed and synthesized.A rapid real-time fluorescence PCR method to detect the drug resistance genes in Campylobacter jejuni samples was established,and the optimum reaction system and conditions were screened through an optimized approach.The developed method was com-pared with the classical drug susceptibility assay.Results It was found in the compared results that,there were 8 inconsis-tent strains of Campylobacter jejuni ,2 of the 8 strains were drug sensitive but contented the drug resistance gene,while 6 strains were drug resistant but had no drug resistant gene.Conclusion The established method can be applied to detect the drug resistance relative genes of gyrA and gyrB in Campylobacter jejuni .There was some correlation between the drug re-sistance representation and its genotype,but this point requires further studies.

Establishment and Application of a Real-Time Quantitative PCR Assay for Detection of Campylobacter Jejuni in Human Feces / 现代检验医学杂志

Objective To establish a real-time quantitative PCR assay for the identification of Campylobacter jejuni in fecal samples.Methods Specific primers of the PCR were designed according to the conserved sequences of Campylobacterjeju-ni,and the real-time quantitative PCR assay was established.150 cases of fecal samples were tested by both culture and PCR methods.With the culture testing results as the reference standard,the sensitivity,specificity,accuracy and repetition of the real-time quantitative PCR were validated.Kappa test was used to estimate the difference between the two detection meth-ods.Results The standard carve of the real-time quantitative PCR assay fitted the equationY=-3.51Log(X)+37.09 (R2=0.996)well.The sensitivity,specificity,and accuracy of the established method were 92.4%,95.8% and 94%,respective-ly.The theoretical detection limit of the PCR method was 102 CFU/ml,and its reproducibility was good (CV<5%).Statisti-cal analysis demonstrated that the results of the two methods were consistent,and the consistent strength was very strong (Kappa=0.88,P<0.05).Conclusion The established real-time PCR method can assay the Campylobacterjejuni in human fecal samples rapidly and accurately.

Effect of different concentrations of human amniotic homogenate supernatant on the proliferation of rat Schwann cells / 中国组织工程研究

BACKGROUND:Schwann cells are important celllines in the process of repairing peripheral nerve injury, and human amniotic homogenate supernatant is shown to secrete a variety of cytokines, which could promote the proliferation of Schwann cells. OBJECTIVE:To investigate the effect of different concentrations of human amniotic homogenate supernatant on the proliferation of rat Schwann cell96. METHODS:Schwann cell96 was cultured with high-glucose DMEM containing 20%fetal bovine serum, and the second generation of Schwann cell96 was applied for experiments. The cultured cells were divided into five groups according to different volume fractions of human amniotic homogenate supernatant (0%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%) in the medium. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:The total protein concentration of human amniotic homogenate supernatant was 675μg/mL, in which the concentration of epidermal growth factor, basic fibroblast growth factor and vascular endothelial growth factor were respectively (470.625±2.546), (4.121±0.026) and (0.172±0.002) ng/L. At 1-7 days, the cellproliferation rate of the 10%and 15%concentration groups was greater than that in 20%and 25%concentration groups (P0.05). Low concentrations (10%, 15%) of human amniotic homogenate supernatant promote the proliferation of Schwann cell96, while high concentrations (20%, 25%) of human amniotic homogenate supernatant inhibit cellproliferation.