Clinical application of enhanced recovery after surgery concept in laparoscopic treatment of pediatric acute appendicitis.

BACKGROUND: This study assesses whether enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) is beneficial in treating acute appendicitis in pediatrics by laparoscopic techniques. METHOD: The children with acute appendicitis (n = 116) were divided into the ERAS group (n = 54) and the control group (n = 62). Then the preoperative data, intraoperative observation indexes, and postoperative data were analyzed. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in preoperative data and intraoperative observation indexes between the two groups. C-reactive protein (CRP) and white blood cell (WBC) in the ERAS group were significantly lower than those in the control group 3 days after the operation. Moreover, no significant difference in the visual analog score (VAS) between the two groups 3 days after the operation, but the other postoperative observation indexes in the ERAS group were significantly better than those in the control group. Nausea and vomiting in the ERAS group were significantly lower than those in the control group, with no significant difference in other complications between the two groups. CONCLUSION: ERAS could improve children's comfort, reduce some postoperative complications, reduce hospitalization expenses, and speed up recovery from acute appendicitis treated by laparoscopy. Therefore, it has clinical application value.

NL-VTON: a non-local virtual try-on network with feature preserving of body and clothes.

In an image based virtual try-on network, both features of the target clothes and the input human body should be preserved. However, current techniques failed to solve the problems of blurriness on complex clothes details and artifacts on human body occlusion regions at the same time. To tackle this issue, we propose a non-local virtual try-on network NL-VTON. Considering that convolution is a local operation and limited by its convolution kernel size and rectangular receptive field, which is unsuitable for large size non-rigid transformations of persons and clothes in virtual try-on, we introduce a non-local feature attention module and a grid regularization loss so as to capture detailed features of complex clothes, and design a human body segmentation prediction network to further alleviate the artifacts on occlusion regions. The quantitative and qualitative experiments based on the Zalando dataset demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the ability to preserve features of bodies and clothes compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Rapid Decoding of Hand Gestures in Electrocorticography Using Recurrent Neural Networks.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a direct communication pathway between brain and external devices, and BCI-based prosthetic devices are promising to provide new rehabilitation options for people with motor disabilities. Electrocorticography (ECoG) signals contain rich information correlated with motor activities, and have great potential in hand gesture decoding. However, most existing decoders use long time windows, thus ignore the temporal dynamics within the period. In this study, we propose to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to exploit the temporal information in ECoG signals for robust hand gesture decoding. With RNN's high nonlinearity modeling ability, our method can effectively capture the temporal information in ECoG time series for robust gesture recognition. In the experiments, we decode three hand gestures using ECoG signals of two participants, and achieve an accuracy of 90%. Specially, we investigate the possibility of recognizing the gestures in a time interval as short as possible after motion onsets. Our method rapidly recognizes gestures within 0.5 s after motion onsets with an accuracy of about 80%. Experimental results also indicate that the temporal dynamics is especially informative for effective and rapid decoding of hand gestures.

Hybrid PET/MRI-based delineation of gross tumor volume in head and neck cancer and tumor parameter analysis.

OBJECTIVES: Accurate target delineation allows an increase in radiation dose to the target tumor while reducing damage to the surrounding normal tissue. However, there is currently no standard for evaluating volumes measured by different imaging modalities. The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of contouring gross tumor volume (GTV) by PET/MRI in head and neck cancer, and to define an adaptive threshold level (aTL) for delineating the biological target volume (BTV). PATIENTS AND METHODS: Eighteen head and neck cancer patients underwent time of flight PET/MRI before chemoradiotherapy. Different GTVs of primary tumors and metastatic lymph nodes were manually contoured on MRI (GTVMRI), PET (GTVVIS), and fused PET/MRI (GTVFUS). An MRI-based GTV contour was substituted for the pathologic GTV. The percentile threshold boundary of the maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) for the BTV was determined when the volume of BTV approached that of GTVMRI. RESULTS: All GTVs were highly correlated (all Pearson's r>0.85, all P<0.001). Tumor diameter strongly correlated with GTVs (r=0.7-0.8 for all lesions and primary tumor; r=0.8-0.9 for lymph node metastases). aTL and SUVmax were moderately correlated for all lesions (r=-0.692, P<0.001) and were strongly correlated for primary tumors (r=-0.866, P<0.001). CONCLUSION: Delineating GTV on hybrid PET/MRIs is feasible, and aTL, the threshold boundary of BTV, was correlated inversely with the SUVmax.

[Relationship between depression and family function in old patients with coronary heart disease].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the relationship between depression and family function in elderly patients with coronary heart disease. METHODS: 122 patients of 80 years old or above with coronary artery disease were invited to complete a questionnaire through face to face interview. The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (17th edition) was used to assess depression status and the APGDR Questionnaire was used to assess family functions. One-way analysis of variance and logistic regression analysis were performed to test the association of family functions with depression. RESULTS: 60.7% of the respondents had depression and 56.6% had severe abnormal family functions. The respondents with good family functions, moderate abnormal family functions and severe abnormal family functions had a depression score of 9.08, 20.72 and 26.88 respectively. The prevalence of depression in the patients with severe abnormal family functions was 3.274 times of that of those with good family functions. The prevalence of depression was also influenced by residency and care models. CONCLUSION: Depression is prevalent in elderly patients with coronary heart disease. It is associated with family functions.

Synthesis and configuration of the nonadecenetriol isolated from seeds of Persea americana.

In an effort to establish the relative as well as absolute configuration of the trypanocidally active natural nonadec-6-en-1,2,4-triol isolated from Persea americana, the (2S,4R), (2S,4S), and (2R,4R) isomers were synthesized. The stereogenic centers taken from enantiopure chiral epoxy building blocks derived from inexpensive and readily available D-glucolactone. The (2R,4R) isomer gave (1)H and (13)C NMR as well as specific rotation in excellent consistence with those reported for the natural triol.

[Purified mouse retinal ganglion cell culture].

OBJECTIVE: To establish a culture system for purified mouse retinal ganglion cells (RGC) culture in order to lay a foundation for the in vitro study of RGC. METHODS: It was a experiment study. Eight to twelve C57BL/6 mice on postnatal day 4 to 6 were used. The retinas were dissected and dissociated enzymatically to make a suspension of single cells. The retinal suspension was incubated in rat anti-mouse-macrophage antiserum for 5 minutes and incubated on a 100 mm anti-rat IgG panning plate at room temperature for 30 min twice. The nonadherent cells were removed with the suspension and placed on the Thy-1.2 panning plate at room temperature. After 45 min, plates were washed 6 - 10 times with phosphate-buffered saline and swirled moderately to dislodge nonadherent cells. Trypsin (0.125% solution) dissociation was used to remove adherent cells from the plate. Then cells were spun and resuspended in neurobasal medium containing some neurotrophic factors. The cell suspension was implanted in 24 well culture plates and cultured under 37°C in an incubator with 5% CO(2). RESULTS: Most of the cells adhered to the plate after 24 hours in culture and showed dendrites at different lengths. The dendrites grew longer with time. Most of the RGC can survive more than two weeks. CONCLUSION: Monoclonal antibody to the Thy-1.2 antigen can be used to purify the mice RGC.

Neural decoding based on probabilistic neural network.

Brain-machine interface (BMI) has been developed due to its possibility to cure severe body paralysis. This technology has been used to realize the direct control of prosthetic devices, such as robot arms, computer cursors, and paralyzed muscles. A variety of neural decoding algorithms have been designed to explore relationships between neural activities and movements of the limbs. In this paper, two novel neural decoding methods based on probabilistic neural network (PNN) in rats were introduced, the PNN decoder and the modified PNN (MPNN) decoder. In the experiment, rats were trained to obtain water by pressing a lever over a pressure threshold. Microelectrode array was implanted in the motor cortex to record neural activity, and pressure was recorded by a pressure sensor synchronously. After training, the pressure values were estimated from the neural signals by PNN and MPNN decoders. Their performances were evaluated by a correlation coefficient (CC) and a mean square error (MSE). The results show that the MPNN decoder, with a CC of 0.8657 and an MSE of 0.2563, outperformed the traditionally-used Wiener filter (WF) and Kalman filter (KF) decoders. It was also observed that the discretization level did not affect the MPNN performance, indicating that the MPNN decoder can handle different tasks in BMI system, including the detection of movement states and estimation of continuous kinematic parameters.

Development of cerebral infarction, apoptotic cell death and expression of X-chromosome-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein following focal cerebral ischemia in rats.

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of apoptosis or necrosis in the development of delayed infarct, and the relationship between the level of XIAP gene, caspase-3 activation and ischemic cell death following transient focal cerebral ischemia. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats underwent right middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo) for 50 min and reperfusion for 0.5, 4, 8, 24 h, 3, 7, 14 days. On TTC-stained coronal sections, delayed infarct was observed to develop in the whole MCA territory, especially in frontoparietal cortex after ischemia. Near total infarct was shown in striatum 24 h after MCAo, while delayed infarct was evident in the cortex. By day 3, the infarct had progressively expanded to the nearly whole area of the frontoparietal cortex. Flow cytometric analysis of Annexin-V (marks apoptosis) and PI (propidium iodide, marks necrosis) labeling cells showed that MCAo dominantly induced necrosis in ischemic core, striatum. Apoptosis contributed to delayed infarct and cell death in the border zone, dorsolateral cortex and hippocampus. The time-course of caspase-3 activation was consistent with the changes of apoptosis and infarct following MCAo. Further RT-PCR experiments indicated that there was a biphasic regulation of XIAP in time- and region-dependent manner after ischemia. In the infarct core (striatum), following a transient and slight increase during 0.5 h to 4 h post-MCAo, expression of XIAP mRNA markedly decreased. On the other hand, a longer and larger upregulation of XIAP was observed at early time points in border zone (0.5 to 8 h, in dorsolateral cortex; 0.5 to 24 h in hippocampus), then the level of XIAP reduced. A negative correlation was observed between apoptosis and regulation of XIAP gene in these regions. Our findings suggest a possible association between expression of XIAP gene, apoptosis and delayed infarct following ischemia.

Neurochemical effects of exercise and neuromuscular electrical stimulation on brain after stroke: a microdialysis study using rat model.

Treadmill exercise and neuromuscular electrical stimulation are common clinical approaches for stroke rehabilitation. Both animal and clinical studies have shown the functional improvements after these interventions. However, the neurochemical effects on the ischemic brain had not been well studied. This study aimed at evaluating the effects of treadmill exercise and neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), and studying their effects during a 2-week training, on the levels of common neurotransmitters (aspartate, glutamate, taurine and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)) in the hippocampus following transient focal cerebral ischemia. Either treadmill exercise or neuromuscular electrical stimulation was prescribed to the rats 24 h after cerebral ischemia whereas Control group remained in cages for 2 weeks. Microdialysis technique was used to collect dialysates from ipsilesional hippocampus in vivo. It was found that the glutamate level was increased significantly during treadmill exercise and then returned to baseline level. Both interventions did not trigger significant effects on aspartate and glutamate basal levels during the 2 weeks. The relatively high taurine level in Control groups may suggest that the interventions might suppress the taurine release in hippocampus. GABA and aspartate levels did not showed significant changes over the 2 weeks in all groups. These results provide insights to explain the neurochemical effects on the ischemic injured brain during the course of rehabilitation.

Inhibitory effects of jujuboside A on EEG and hippocampal glutamate in hyperactive rat.

In this study, the inhibitory effect of jujuboside A (JuA) on a penicillin sodium (Na-PCN) induced hyperactivity model was investigated. Cortical EEG (electroencephalogram) and the concentration of hippocampal Glutamate (Glu) were monitored simultaneously in vivo as indicators of rat's excitatory state. Power spectral density (PSD) and gravity frequency of PSD were calculated. JuA (0.05 g/L and 0.1 g/L) inhibited the EEG excitation effect caused by Na-PCN by increasing the power of delta1 and delta2 bands (P<0.01 vs model) and lowering the gravity frequency of PSD (P<0.01 vs model). JuA also remarkably reduced the Glu elevation induced by Na-PCN (P<0.05 vs model). Diazepam also depressed Glu concentration and lowered the gravity frequency, but it showed a different EEG pattern in increased beta2-activity (P<0.01 vs model). EEG excitation caused by Na-PCN correlated with Glu elevation during the first hour. Neurophysiological inhibitory effects of JuA and diazepam were more persistent than their Glu inhibitory effects.