Mcclureblackwell9673
Antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT) has become a popular technology for the treatment of bacterial infections. The development of antimicrobial agents combining diagnosis and treatment remains a major challenge. Herein, curcumin carbon quantum dots (Cur-NRCQDs) with antibacterial and imaging effects were synthesized using a hydrothermal method. The fluorescence absorption range of the Cur-NRCQDs in aqueous solution was 555 to 850 nm, showing orange-red to near infrared (NIR) fluorescence, and its maximum emission wavelength was 635 nm. At the same time, Cur-NRCQDs improved the efficiency of Cur as the photosensitizer (PS), showed good storage and light stability, and enhanced the efficiency of reactive oxygen (ROS) generation and antibacterial activity. Under the irradiation of a xenon lamp, Cur-NRCQDs inactivated 100% Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Escherichia coli (E. coli) at concentrations of 10 and 15 μM, respectively. The possible reason for this was that under PDT, the ROS produced by the Cur-NRCQDs destroyed the integrity of the cell membrane, resulting in leakage of the contents. In addition, the Cur-NRCQDs showed good cell compatibility, as they can also enter bacteria and cells for imaging, so they can be employed for the detection of bacteria and cell tissues. Therefore, Cur-NRCQDs are an ideal candidate material for aPDT treatment and fluorescent bioimaging.This paper studies the hypothesis that not all modalities are always needed to predict affective states. We explore this hypothesis in the context of recognizing three affective states that have shown a relation to a future onset of depression positive, aggressive, and dysphoric. In particular, we investigate three important modalities for face-to-face conversations vision, language, and acoustic modality. We first perform a human study to better understand which subset of modalities people find informative, when recognizing three affective states. As a second contribution, we explore how these human annotations can guide automatic affect recognition systems to be more interpretable while not degrading their predictive performance. Our studies show that humans can reliably annotate modality informativeness. Further, we observe that guided models significantly improve interpretability, i.e., they attend to modalities similarly to how humans rate the modality informativeness, while at the same time showing a slight increase in predictive performance.Brain atlases are of fundamental importance for analyzing the dynamic neurodevelopment in fetal brain studies. Since the brain size, shape, and anatomical structures change rapidly during the prenatal period, it is essential to construct a spatiotemporal (4D) atlas equipped with tissue probability maps, which can preserve sharper early brain folding patterns for accurately characterizing dynamic changes in fetal brains and provide tissue prior informations for related tasks, e.g., segmentation, registration, and parcellation. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised age-conditional learning framework to build temporally continuous fetal brain atlases by incorporating tissue segmentation maps, which outperforms previous traditional atlas construction methods in three aspects. First, our framework enables learning age-conditional deformable templates by leveraging the entire collection. Second, we leverage reliable brain tissue segmentation maps in addition to the low-contrast noisy intensity images to enhance the alignment of individual images. Third, a novel loss function is designed to enforce the similarity between the learned tissue probability map on the atlas and each subject tissue segmentation map after registration, thereby providing extra anatomical consistency supervision for atlas building. Our 4D temporally-continuous fetal brain atlases are constructed based on 82 healthy fetuses from 22 to 32 gestational weeks. Compared with the atlases built by the state-of-the-art algorithms, our atlases preserve more structural details and sharper folding patterns. Together with the learned tissue probability maps, our 4D fetal atlases provide a valuable reference for spatial normalization and analysis of fetal brain development.Longitudinal infant dedicated cerebellum atlases play a fundamental role in characterizing and understanding the dynamic cerebellum development during infancy. However, due to the limited spatial resolution, low tissue contrast, tiny folding structures, and rapid growth of the cerebellum during this stage, it is challenging to build such atlases while preserving clear folding details. Furthermore, the existing atlas construction methods typically independently build discrete atlases based on samples for each age group without considering the within-subject temporal consistency, which is critical for large-scale longitudinal studies. To fill this gap, we propose an age-conditional multi-stage learning framework to construct longitudinally consistent 4D infant cerebellum atlases. Specifically, 1) A joint affine and deformable atlas construction framework is proposed to accurately build temporally continuous atlases based on the entire cohort, and rapidly warp the new images to the atlas space; 2) A longitudinal constraint is employed to enforce the within-subject temporal consistency during atlas building; 3) A Correntropy based regularization loss is further exploited to enhance the robustness of our framework. Our atlases are constructed based on 405 longitudinal scans from 187 healthy infants with age ranging from 6 to 27 months, and are compared to the atlases built by state-of-the-art algorithms. Results demonstrate that our atlases preserve more structural details and fine-grained cerebellum folding patterns, which ensure higher accuracy in subsequent atlas-based registration and segmentation tasks.The HIV-1 nef gene terminates in a 3'-UGA stop codon, which is highly conserved in the main group of HIV-1 subtypes, along with a downstream potential coding region that could extend the nef protein by 33 amino acids, if readthrough of the stop codon occurs. Antisense tethering interactions (ATIs) between a viral mRNA and a host selenoprotein mRNA are a potential viral strategy for the capture of a host selenocysteine insertion sequence (SECIS) element (Taylor et al, 2016) [1]. This mRNA hijacking mechanism could enable the expression of virally encoded selenoprotein modules, via translation of in-frame UGA stop codons as selenocysteine (SeC). MST-312 Telomerase inhibitor Here we show that readthrough of the 3'-terminal UGA codon of nef occurs during translation of HIV-1 nef expression constructs in transfected cells. This was accomplished via fluorescence microscopy image analysis and flow cytometry of HEK 293 cells, transfected with engineered GFP reporter gene plasmid constructs, in which GFP can only be expressed by translational recoding of the UGA codon. SiRNA knockdown of thioredoxin reductase 1 (TR1) mRNA resulted in a 67% decrease in GFP expression, presumably due to reduced availability of the components involved in selenocysteine incorporation for the stop codon readthrough, thus supporting the proposed ATI. Addition of 20 nM sodium selenite to the media significantly enhanced stop codon readthrough in the pNefATI1 plasmid construct, by >100%, supporting the hypothesis that selenium is involved in the UGA readthrough mechanism.University teachers in Bangladesh and Nigeria, in general, are novices in using modern technologies such as Google classroom in the teaching learning process. This study aims to explore teachers' attitudes towards the use of Google classroom and investigate the factors that influence the teachers' acceptance and behavioural intentions to use it as a learning management system. A quantitative method has been used to examine the teachers' acceptance of Google classroom based on a simplified technology acceptance model (TAM) in two universities located in Bangladesh and Nigeria. The study reveals that Bangladeshi teachers have a higher positive attitude towards accepting this platform compared to Nigerian teachers. Besides, Nigerian teachers are impacted significantly by the technology challenges during its use. The findings of this study inform educators of the key aspects of Google classroom use which could enable them to effectively adopt it during and post the COVID-19 pandemic.
Transportation is a common barrier to colonoscopy completion for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. The study aims to identify the barriers, facilitators, and process recommendations to implement a rideshare non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) intervention following colonoscopy completion within a safety-net healthcare setting.
We used informal stakeholder engagement, story boards - a novel user-centered design technique, listening sessions and the nominal group technique to identify the barriers, facilitators, and process to implementing a rideshare NEMT program following colonoscopy completion in a large safety-net healthcare system.
Barriers to implementing a rideshare NEMT intervention for colonoscopy completion included inability to expand an existing NEMT program beyond Medicaid patients and lack of patient chaperones with rideshare NEMT programs. Facilitators included commercially available rideshare NEMT platforms that were lower cost and had shorter wait times than the alternative of taoadly applicable to other safety-net health systems, populations with high social needs, and settings where procedural sedation is administered.
Psychiatric admissions during the covid-19 pandemic were limited, overlooking their possible benefit. This study focused on assessing the effect of the fear of covid on the mental health and well-being of inpatients as opposed to outpatients.
During the first lockdown, forty-four inpatients and day care patients (inpatient group) and 74 outpatients (outpatient group) were recruited after an informed consent procedure. Fear of the infection was assessed using the Fear of COVID-19 (FCV-19S); severity of mental health symptomatology was evaluated with the outcome questionnaire-45 (OQ-45); wellbeing was assessed with the Psychological well-being scale (PWB).
There was no difference between the inpatient group and outpatient group in their fear of COVID-19 levels.FCV-19 predicted changes in the outpatient OQ total score (B=2.21,
0.001), OQ interpersonal relation subscale (B=0.34,
0.01), PWB total score (B=-0.05,
0.001), PWB environmental mastery subscale (B=-0.07,
0.001) and PWB positive relation subscale (B=-0.05,
0.001), but not in the inpatient group.
Mental health and wellbeing of the outpatient group, which had less therapeutic contact than the inpatient group, correlated with the fear of covid, supporting the hypothesis that intensive psychiatric therapy had a protective effect on the mental health consequences of "fear of covid".
Mental health and wellbeing of the outpatient group, which had less therapeutic contact than the inpatient group, correlated with the fear of covid, supporting the hypothesis that intensive psychiatric therapy had a protective effect on the mental health consequences of "fear of covid".
While it has been shown that aerobic exercise interventions are well tolerated in participants with the Huntington disease (HD) gene mutation, no study to date has tested whether an aerobic exercise intervention benefits brain structure and function in pre-manifest HD.
In this study we utilized magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques to assess the efficacy of moderate-to-vigorous exercise treatment relative to active stretching and toning control.
Forty pre-manifest participants with confirmed HD gene expansion were recruited into a two-arm intervention study that included a moderate-to-vigorous intensity home-based walking exercise intervention (N=34) and an active stretching and toning control intervention (N=6). Participants were assessed at baseline and after 26 weeks in one of the two study arms.
25 of the 34 (74%) participants assigned to the moderate-to-vigorous intensity group completed the intervention while 4 of the 6 (67%) participants in the stretching and toning intervention completed the study.
