Supplementing Boar Diet with Nicotinamide Mononucleotide Improves Sperm Quality Probably through the Activation of the SIRT3 Signaling Pathway

Sperm quality is an important indicator to evaluate the reproduction ability of animals. Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) participates in cell energy metabolism and reduces cell oxidative stress. However, the effect and regulatory mechanism of NMN on porcine sperm quality are still unknown. Here, 32 Landrace boars were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 8) and fed with different levels of NMN (0, 8, 16 or 32 mg/kg/d) for 9 weeks, and then serum and semen samples of the boars were collected to investigate the function and molecular mechanism of NMN in sperm quality. The results showed that the dietary NMN supplementation significantly increased sperm volume, density and motility (p < 0.05). Interestingly, NMN apparently improved the antioxidative indexes and increased the levels of testosterone (p < 0.05) in serum. Furthermore, NMN upregulated the protein levels of sirtuin 3 (SIRT3), antioxidation and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), but downregulated the protein levels of apoptosis in semen. Mechanically, NMN protected sperm from H2O2-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis through SIRT3 deacetylation. Importantly, the SIRT3-specific inhibitor 3-TYP attenuated the antioxidation and antiapoptosis of NMN in sperm. Therefore, NMN exerts antioxidation and antiapoptosis to improve boar sperm quality via the SIRT3 signaling pathway. Our findings suggest that NMN is a novel potential boar antioxidative feed additive to produce high-quality porcine semen.

The diagnostic performance of V' and U' variables as an objective index of pink-color sign for diagnosing esophageal cancerous lesions

BACKGROUND

The pink-color sign (PCS) has been widely used for diagnosing esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) during Lugol's iodine chromoendoscopy. However, the identification of the PCS only relies on the subjective assessments made by the endoscopist, which could lead to bias and disagreement. Previous research has indicated that the V' variable can, as an objective index, define the PCS in the LU'V' color space. We aimed to validate the diagnostic performance of the PCS defined by the V' variable alone and attempt to improve the diagnostic performance by combining the V' and U' variables.

METHODS

We re-examined 231 subjects with Lugol's unstained lesions (LULs) from a previously reported prospective trial. The diagnostic performance of the method using V' variable alone (V' alone method), the combination method using V' and U' variables (V' + U' method), and the endoscopists were calculated and compared.

RESULTS

A total of 236 LULs were included, among which 46 were histologically confirmed to be cancerous lesions. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the V' alone method were 73.91% (95% CI 58.87-85.73%), 79.47% (95% CI 73.03-84.98%), and 78.39% (95% CI 72.59-83.47%) in the external validation cohort, respectively. It is inferior to endoscopists in terms of specificity and accuracy. The V' + U' method demonstrated a diagnostic performance comparable to the experienced endoscopists, with sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 76.74% (95% CI 61.37-88.25%), 88.64% (95% CI 83.00-92.92%), and 86.30% (95% CI 81.03-90.56%), respectively.

CONCLUSION

The V' alone method exhibited lower specificity and accuracy than the experienced endoscopist and the V' + U' method. However, the modified V' + U' method demonstrated a diagnostic performance comparable to experienced endoscopists. Utilizing the objective index of the PCS could provide valuable support in clinical decision-making.

[Tumor Mechanomedicine]

Malignant tumors represent a significant health challenge, critically impacting human well-being. Historically, the focus has been on leveraging the biochemical cues of tumors for both diagnosis and treatment. While valuable, this strategy does not capture the full complexity of tumor diagnosis and management. Recently, the integration of biomechanics and mechanobiology with oncology has highlighted the importance of mechanical cues, which have emerged as new hallmarks of tumors, opening potential novel routes for cancer diagnosis and therapeutic interventions. Despite the advances, a thorough literature review suggests a pronounced gap in our understanding of the mechanical properties of tumors. The clinical community has not yet completely recognized the diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of the mechanical cues of tumors. To bridge this knowledge gap, we propose and introduce the paradigm of "Tumor Mechanomedicine". We provide a comprehensive overview of the multi-scale mechanical characteristics of tumors, exploring their influence on tumor biology, from the aspects of tumor biomechanics, tumor mechanobiology, tumor mechanodiagnostics, and tumor mechanotherapeutics. By elucidating the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of these mechanical cues, we aim to furnish the oncology community with fresh insights, paving the way for innovative solutions to persistent clinical conundrums.

Hypertonic solution as an optimal submucosal injection solution for endoscopic resection of gastrointestinal mucosal lesions: Systematic review and network meta-analysis

OBJECTIVES

Based on different physicochemical properties, common submucosal injection solutions could be classified into three categories: normal saline solution (NS), hypertonic solution (HS), and viscous solution (VS). We compared the efficacy and safety of various categories of solutions in this network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to identify the optimal submucosal injection fluid.

METHODS

PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library were searched for RCTs that compared the efficacy and safety of NS, HS, and VS during endoscopic resection for gastrointestinal (GI) mucosal lesions. Pairwise and network analyses were conducted to determine the ranking of different fluids.

RESULTS

Thirteen RCTs were included in the final analysis with 1637 patients (1639 lesions). HS outperformed NS in rates of en bloc (pooled relative risk [RR] 1.50; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.10-1.90), overall bleeding (pooled odds ratio [OR] 0.33; 95% CI 0.10-0.88; lesions >10 mm OR 4.65 × 10-2 ; 95% CI 1.10 × 10-3 -0.46), and intraoperative bleeding (lesions >10 mm OR 7.10 × 10-6 ; 95% CI 4.30 × 10-18 -0.26). HS showed the highest probability of ranking first in each outcome except for the volume of injection. Although VS was superior to NS in rates of en bloc, overall, and intraoperative bleeding in the lesions >10 mm subgroup, and required less fluid in pooled analysis, it ranked last in cost of submucosal injection solution.

CONCLUSIONS

Both HS and VS were superior to NS in comparisons of efficacy and safety. Considering the better performance and potentially low cost, HS might be an optimal choice during gastrointestinal endoscopic resection, especially for colorectal endoscopic mucosal resection.

Dual Attention and Patient Similarity Network for drug recommendation

MOTIVATION

Artificially making clinical decisions for patients with multi-morbidity has long been considered a thorny problem due to the complexity of the disease. Drug recommendations can assist doctors in automatically providing effective and safe drug combinations conducive to treatment and reducing adverse reactions. However, the existing drug recommendation works ignored two critical information. (i) Different types of medical information and their interrelationships in the patient's visit history can be used to construct a comprehensive patient representation. (ii) Patients with similar disease characteristics and their corresponding medication information can be used as a reference for predicting drug combinations.

RESULTS

To address these limitations, we propose DAPSNet, which encodes multi-type medical codes into patient representations through code- and visit-level attention mechanisms, while integrating drug information corresponding to similar patient states to improve the performance of drug recommendation. Specifically, our DAPSNet is enlightened by the decision-making process of human doctors. Given a patient, DAPSNet first learns the importance of patient history records between diagnosis, procedure and drug in different visits, then retrieves the drug information corresponding to similar patient disease states for assisting drug combination prediction. Moreover, in the training stage, we introduce a novel information constraint loss function based on the information bottleneck principle to constrain the learned representation and enhance the robustness of DAPSNet. We evaluate the proposed DAPSNet on the public MIMIC-III dataset, our model achieves relative improvements of 1.33%, 1.20% and 2.03% in Jaccard, F1 and PR-AUC scores, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The source code is available at the github repository: https://github.com/andylun96/DAPSNet.

Additively manufactured nano-mechanical energy harvesting systems: advancements, potential applications, challenges and future perspectives

Additively manufactured nano-MEH systems are widely used to harvest energy from renewable and sustainable energy sources such as wind, ocean, sunlight, raindrops, and ambient vibrations. A comprehensive study focusing on in-depth technology evolution, applications, problems, and future trends of specifically 3D printed nano-MEH systems with an energy point of view is rarely conducted. Therefore, this paper looks into the state-of-the-art technologies, energy harvesting sources/methods, performance, implementations, emerging applications, potential challenges, and future perspectives of additively manufactured nano-mechanical energy harvesting (3DP-NMEH) systems. The prevailing challenges concerning renewable energy harvesting capacities, optimal energy scavenging, power management, material functionalization, sustainable prototyping strategies, new materials, commercialization, and hybridization are discussed. A novel solution is proposed for renewable energy generation and medicinal purposes based on the sustainable utilization of recyclable municipal and medical waste generated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, recommendations for future research are presented concerning the cutting-edge issues hurdling the optimal exploitation of renewable energy resources through NMEHs. China and the USA are the most significant leading forces in enhancing 3DP-NMEH technology, with more than 75% contributions collectively. The reported output energy capacities of additively manufactured nano-MEH systems were 0.5-32 mW, 0.0002-45.6 mW, and 0.3-4.67 mW for electromagnetic, piezoelectric, and triboelectric nanogenerators, respectively. The optimal strategies and techniques to enhance these energy capacities are compiled in this paper.

Improved estimation of motion blur parameters for restoration from a single image

This paper presents an improved method to estimate the blur parameters of motion deblurring algorithm for single image restoration based on the point spread function (PSF) in frequency spectrum. We then introduce a modification to the Radon transform in the blur angle estimation scheme with our proposed difference value vs angle curve. Subsequently, the auto-correlation matrix is employed to estimate the blur angle by measuring the distance between the conjugated-correlated troughs. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy, robustness and time efficiency of our proposed method with the existing algorithms on the public benchmarks and the natural real motion blurred images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PSF estimation scheme not only could obtain a higher accuracy for the blur angle and blur length, but also demonstrate stronger robustness and higher time efficiency under different circumstances.

Using Mobile Phone Data for Emergency Management: a Systematic Literature Review

Emergency management (EM) has always been a concern of people from all walks of life due to the devastating impacts emergencies can have. The global outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 has pushed EM to the top topic. As mobile phones have become ubiquitous, many scholars have shown interest in using mobile phone data for EM. This paper presents a systematic literature review about the use of mobile phone data for EM that includes 65 related articles written between 2014 and 2019 from six electronic databases. Five themes in using mobile phone data for EM emerged from the reviewed articles, and a systematic framework is proposed to illustrate the current state of the research. This paper also discusses EM under COVID-19 pandemic and five future implications of the proposed framework to guide future work.