Circular RNA (circRNA) is a non-coding RNA which exists widely in eukaryotic cells with a structure of covalently closed continuous loop. Its generation, characteristics and functions have received extensive attention, making it one of the hot spots in the field of non-coding RNA research. Many studies have found that circRNA plays an important role in the development of various diseases including cardiovascular disease, nervous system disease and cancer. Cardiovascular disease is a worldwide common disease with high incidence and poor prognosis. Its exact pathogenesis has not been found, which blocks the development of cardiovascular disease treatment. In this review, we summarize the loop-forming mechanisms, the functions and the progress of current researches of circRNA in cardiovascular diseases.
Objective To summarize the research progress of pathogenetic and development mechanism of phyllodes tumor of breast (PTB). Method Summarizing the studies on pathogenetic and development mechanism of PTB by searching PubMed, Web of Science, CNKI, and Wanfang databases, and then make a review. Results Currently, there was no uniform conclusion on the pathogenetic and development mechanism of PTB, though many factors may involve in the pathogenesis of PTB. PTB may be derived from fibroadenoma, and some studies suggested that it was closely related to hormonal receptor disorders, epithelial mesenchymal transition mechanism, gene mutation, and so on. Conclusion The pathogenetic and development mechanism of PTB is not clear yet and more researches are needed to confirm it.
Objective To investigate the pharmacological effects and mechanisms of natural medicine artemisinin and its derivatives. Methods The pertinent domestic and overseas literatures of recent years were reviewed and summarized. Results Artemisinin and its derivatives have unique structure, high efficiency with low toxicity. The pharmacological effects include anti-malaria, anti-tumor, immune function regulation, anti-bacterial, anti-fetation, anti-fibrosis, heat-clearing and detoxicating, etc. Conclusion Artemisinin and its derivatives play pharmacological effects in different ways, and have a good foreground in the application.
Objective Can we successfully make diagnosis, treatment and prevention in patients with SARS in the economically undeveloped region? Methods we retrospectively reviewed the whole process of diagnosis, treatment and prevention in three patients with SARS. Results All the three patients recovered with no socomial infection in medical staff and no second-generation patients. Conclusion In the economically undeveloped region, if one attached importance to epidemic crisis inwardly and put all the steps into effect really, and if one took four early steps, started the contingent mechanism up urgently, worked can onically and treated patients actively when the epidemic crisis broke out, the outbreak could be overcome successfully with little cost.
Objectives Through a systematic review, to summarize and describe various health security mechanisms of protecting financial risk from illness in low and middle income countries (LMICs), and to analyze causes that lead to different effects in financial risk protecting. Methods Search words were chosen by both health policy experts and search coordinators after discussion and pilot. Twenty-four electronic databases, websites of 11 health institutions, and the search engine Google were searched. Any original study to evaluate the role of financial protection of health security mechanism in LMICs was included. Pre-designed data extraction form was used for collecting strategies and study method of included studies, and extracted information was analyzed and described. Results Fifty-two studies were included, and 56 specific health security mechanisms were categorized into 6: community-based health insurance, social health insurance, health sector reform, subsidy, user fee, and new rural cooperative medical scheme (NRCMS) in China. Forty-two mechanisms had positive effect in financial protection, 6 were negative, 5 had no effect and the effect of the other 2 was unclear. Conclusion Mechanisms that produced positive effect can be summarized as: setting up of co-payment rate, design of benefit packages, providing free care for vulnerable population, delivering primary health care directly in remote area, and Chinese NRCMS. Mechanisms to protect the poor from financial risk of illness include: government provides health insurance, providing free care and setting up different co-payment rate according to income. The failure of health security mechanisms can be ascribed the deviation from its original goal of health security mechanism design, due to various inner or external causes.
Objective To summarize the papers about the research status and prospects of ferroptosis in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and its drug resistance in recent years in order to provide directions and ideas for the treatment of HCC. Method The relevant literatures at home and abroad in recent years about ferroptosis in HCC and its drug resistance were reviewed. Results The mechanism of ferroptosis in the development and drug resistance of HCC was complicated, involving multiple protein and molecular pathways. Ferroptosis played an important role in improving chemotherapy and sorafenib resistance, and it had a broad application prospect in HCC. Conclusions The molecular mechanism of ferroptosis in HCC and its drug resistance has not been fully elucidated. Further research on the mechanism of ferroptosis in HCC may provide new molecular therapeutic targets for HCC. Ferroptosis has a broad application prospect in the treatment of HCC.
Objective To recognize the different phases of Korotkoff sounds through deep learning technology, so as to improve the accuracy of blood pressure measurement in different populations. Methods A classification model of the Korotkoff sounds phases was designed, which fused attention mechanism (Attention), residual network (ResNet) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). First, a single Korotkoff sound signal was extracted from the whole Korotkoff sounds signals beat by beat, and each Korotkoff sound signal was converted into a Mel spectrogram. Then, the local feature extraction of Mel spectrogram was processed by using the Attention mechanism and ResNet network, and BiLSTM network was used to deal with the temporal relations between features, and full-connection layer network was applied in reducing the dimension of features. Finally, the classification was completed by SoftMax function. The dataset used in this study was collected from 44 volunteers (24 females, 20 males with an average age of 36 years), and the model performance was verified using 10-fold cross-validation. Results The classification accuracy of the established model for the 5 types of Korotkoff sounds phases was 93.4%, which was higher than that of other models. Conclusion This study proves that the deep learning method can accurately classify Korotkoff sounds phases, which lays a strong technical foundation for the subsequent design of automatic blood pressure measurement methods based on the classification of the Korotkoff sounds phases.
The accurate segmentation of breast ultrasound images is an important precondition for the lesion determination. The existing segmentation approaches embrace massive parameters, sluggish inference speed, and huge memory consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose T2KD Attention U-Net (dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation Attention U-Net), a lightweight semantic segmentation method combined double-path joint distillation in breast ultrasound images. Primarily, we designed two teacher models to learn the fine-grained features from each class of images according to different feature representation and semantic information of benign and malignant breast lesions. Then we leveraged the joint distillation to train a lightweight student model. Finally, we constructed a novel weight balance loss to focus on the semantic feature of small objection, solving the unbalance problem of tumor and background. Specifically, the extensive experiments conducted on Dataset BUSI and Dataset B demonstrated that the T2KD Attention U-Net outperformed various knowledge distillation counterparts. Concretely, the accuracy, recall, precision, Dice, and mIoU of proposed method were 95.26%, 86.23%, 85.09%, 83.59%and 77.78% on Dataset BUSI, respectively. And these performance indexes were 97.95%, 92.80%, 88.33%, 88.40% and 82.42% on Dataset B, respectively. Compared with other models, the performance of this model was significantly improved. Meanwhile, compared with the teacher model, the number, size, and complexity of student model were significantly reduced (2.2×106 vs. 106.1×106, 8.4 MB vs. 414 MB, 16.59 GFLOPs vs. 205.98 GFLOPs, respectively). Indeedy, the proposed model guarantees the performances while greatly decreasing the amount of computation, which provides a new method for the deployment of clinical medical scenarios.
Objective To analyze the substitution mechanism of surrogate endpoints for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) clinical efficacy evaluation of chronic heart failure (CHF). Methods To obtain data from the occurrence of surrogate endpoints and cardiogenic death of patients with CHF in 7 hospitals. The causal relationship between surrogate endpoints and cardiogenic mortality was inferred by the Bayesian network model, and the interaction among surrogate endpoints was analyzed by non-conditional logistic regression model. Results A total of 2 961 patients with CHF were included. The results of Bayesian network causal inference showed that cardiogenic mortality had a causal relationship with the surrogate endpoints including NYHA classification (P=0.46), amino-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) (P=0.24), left ventricular ejaculation fraction (LVEF) (P=0.19), and hemoglobin (HB) (P=0.11); non-conditional logistic regression analysis showed that NYHA classification had interaction with NT-proBNP, LVEF, and HB prior to and after adjusting confounders. Conclusions The substitution capability of surrogate endpoints for TCM clinical efficacy evaluation of CHF for cardiogenic mortality are NYHA classification, NT-proBNP, LVEF, and HB in turn, and there is a multiplicative interaction between the main surrogate endpoint NYHA classification and the secondary surrogate endpoints including NT-proBNP, LVEF, and HB, suggesting that when the two surrogate endpoints with interaction exist at the same time, it can enhance the substitution capability of surrogate endpoints for cardiogenic mortality.
ObjectiveTo summarize potential related proteins in thyroid papillary carcinoma metastasis and explore its mechanism.MethodThe relevant literatures on the potential related proteins of papillary thyroid carcinoma metastasis at home and abroad were reviewed.ResultsThe previous studies had shown that many biological indicators might be associated with the metastasis of papillary thyroid carcinoma, such as the interleukin-13 receptor alpha 2, chemokine receptor 7, low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 4, cytokine receptor-like factor 1, Rho-related protein kinase 1, and astrocyte up-regulated gene-1 were involved in the proliferation, migration, and metastasis of papillary thyroid carcinoma, which might be the potential therapeutic target for the papillary thyroid carcinoma.ConclusionsThyroid papillary carcinoma metastasis-associated proteins play an important role in tumor metastasis. Some progress has been made in study of metastasis mechanisms, its role and mechanism in lymphatic metastasis should be further studied.