Effect of Heat Treatment on Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Mg-10Li-3Al-3Zn-0.22Si Alloy

Yazhao Shen,Defu Li,Shengli Guo,Jiangtao Guo 대한금속·재료학회 2022 METALS AND MATERIALS International Vol.28 No.10

The microstructure evolution and mechanical properties of as-extruded Mg-10Li-3Al-3Zn-0.22Si during heat treatment from473 to 673 K were investigated in this paper, and then the strengthening mechanism and fracture behavior of the studied alloywas also analyzed. Experimental results show that the matrix of as-extruded Mg-10Li-3Al-3Zn-0.22Si alloy mainly consistsof α-Mg and β-Li, and dispersive granular phases are AlLi and Li2MgAl. Mg2Siphase shows banded distribution alongextrusion direction. The morphology of α-Mg is from long strip to nearly spherical block at 573 K. The α-Mg reprecipitatesfrom β-Li matrix in the orientation relationship: (0001) α-Mg // (110) β-Li, [11 −2 0] α-Mg // [1 −1 0] β-Li at 623 K. While theAl-rich granular phase is decomposed and dissolve into the gradually, and then AlLi increase again at 673 K, which may becaused by the dissolution at high temperature and precipitation during air cooling in heat treatment. Besides, the solid solutionand dispersion strengthening enhances the strength of alloy after heat treatment. After heat-treated at 573 K for 1 h and thenair cooling, alloy presents excellent mechanical properties with the ultimate tensile strength of 253 ± 3 MPa and elongationof 27 ± 3%, respectively. Compared with the extruded state, ultimate tensile strength of alloy can be increased by about 49%.

Genome-wide identification and evolution of TC1/Mariner in the silkworm (Bombyx mori) genome

Li‑Qin Xie,Ping‑Lan Wang,Shen‑Hua Jiang,Ze Zhang,Hua‑Hao Zhang 한국유전학회 2018 Genes & Genomics Vol.40 No.5

TC1/Mariner transposons belong to class II transposable elements (TEs) that use DNA-mediated “cut and paste” mechanism to transpose, and they have been identified in almost all organisms. Although silkworm (Bombyx mori) has a large amount of TC1/Mariner elements, the genome wide information of this superfamily in the silkworm is unknown. In this study, we have identified 2670 TC1/Mariner (Bmmar) elements in the silkworm genome. All the TEs were classified into 22 families by means of fgclust, a tool of repetitive sequence classification, seven of which was first reported in this study. Phylogenetic and structure analyses based on the catalytic domain (DDxD/E) of transposase sequences indicated that all members of TC1/Mariner were grouped into five subgroups: Mariner, Tc1, maT, DD40D and DD41D/E. Of these five subgroups, maT rather than Mariner possessed most members of TC1/Mariner (51.23%) in the silkworm genome. In particular, phylogenetic analysis and structure analysis revealed that Bmmar15 (DD40D) formed a new basal subgroup of TC1/Mariner element in insects, which was referred to as bmori. Furthermore, we concluded that DD40D appeared to intermediate between mariner and Tc1. Finally, we estimated the insertion time for each copy of TC1/Mariner in the silkworm and found that most of members were dramatically amplified during a period from 0 to 1 mya. Moreover, the detailed functional data analysis showed that Bmmar1, Bmmar6 and Bmmar9 had EST evidence and intact transposases. These implied that TC1/Mariner might have potential transpositional activity. In conclusion, this study provides some new insights into the landscape, origin and evolution of TC1/Mariner in the insect genomes.

Gyral net: A new representation of cortical folding organization

Chen, Hanbo,Li, Yujie,Ge, Fangfei,Li, Gang,Shen, Dinggang,Liu, Tianming Elsevier 2017 Medical image analysis Vol.42 No.-

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>One distinct feature of the cerebral cortex is its convex (gyri) and concave (sulci) folding patterns. Due to the remarkable complexity and variability of gyral/sulcal shapes, it has been challenging to quantitatively model their organization patterns. Inspired by the observation that the lines of gyral crests can form a connected graph on each brain hemisphere, we propose a new representation of cortical gyri/sulci organization pattern – gyral net, which models cortical architecture from a graph perspective, starting with nodes and edges obtained from the reconstructed cortical surfaces. A novel computational framework is developed to efficiently and automatically construct gyral nets from surface meshes, and four measurements are devised to quantify the folding patterns. Using an MRI dataset for autism study as a test bed, we identified reduced local connectivity cost and increased curviness of gyral net bilaterally on the parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe in autistic patients. Additionally, we found that the cortical thickness and the gyral straightness of gyral joints are higher than the rest of gyral crest regions. The proposed representation offers a new tool for a comprehensive and reliable characterization of the cortical folding organization. This novel computational framework will enable large-scale analyses of cortical folding patterns in the future.</P> <P><B>Highlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> A new representation of cortical gyri/sulci organization pattern. </LI> <LI> A novel framework to efficiently and automatically construct gyral net from mesh surface. </LI> <LI> A new tool for a comprehensive and reliable characterization of the cortical folding organization. </LI> <LI> Enable large-scale cortical folding pattern analyses in the future. </LI> </UL> </P> <P><B>Graphical abstract</B></P> <P>Illustration of the concept of gyral net and gyral joint. (a) Reconstructed cortical surface color-coded by gyral altitude. (b) Extracted gyral net. (c) Zoom in view of the circled area in (b). In this paper, we propose a new representation of cortical gyri/sulci organization pattern – gyral net, which models cortical architecture from a graph perspective, starting with nodes and edges obtained from the surface reconstructions.</P> <P>[DISPLAY OMISSION]</P>

Scalable joint segmentation and registration framework for infant brain images

Dong, Pei,Wang, Li,Lin, Weili,Shen, Dinggang,Wu, Guorong Elsevier 2017 Neurocomputing Vol.229 No.-

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>The first year of life is the most dynamic and perhaps the most critical phase of postnatal brain development. The ability to accurately measure structure changes is critical in early brain development study, which highly relies on the performances of image segmentation and registration techniques. However, either infant image segmentation or registration, if deployed independently, encounters much more challenges than segmentation/registration of adult brains due to dynamic appearance change with rapid brain development. In fact, image segmentation and registration of infant images can assists each other to overcome the above challenges by using the growth trajectories (i.e., temporal correspondences) learned from a large set of training subjects with complete longitudinal data. Specifically, a one-year-old image with ground-truth tissue segmentation can be first set as the reference domain. Then, to register the infant image of a new subject at earlier age, we can estimate its tissue probability maps, i.e., with sparse patch-based multi-atlas label fusion technique, where only the training images at the respective age are considered as atlases since they have similar image appearance. Next, these probability maps can be fused as a good initialization to guide the level set segmentation. Thus, image registration between the new infant image and the reference image is free of difficulty of appearance changes, by establishing correspondences upon the reasonably segmented images. Importantly, the segmentation of new infant image can be further enhanced by propagating the much more reliable label fusion heuristics at the reference domain to the corresponding location of the new infant image via the learned growth trajectories, which brings image segmentation and registration to assist each other. It is worth noting that our joint segmentation and registration framework is also flexible to handle the registration of any two infant images even with significant age gap in the first year of life, by linking their joint segmentation and registration through the reference domain. Thus, our proposed joint segmentation and registration method is scalable to various registration tasks in early brain development studies. Promising segmentation and registration results have been achieved for infant brain MR images aged from 2-week-old to 1-year-old, indicating the applicability of our method in early brain development study.</P> <P><B>Highlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> We developed an efficient approach to deal with the tissue segmentation and registration for the infant brain MR images. </LI> <LI> Our proposed framework is scalable to various registration tasks in early brain development studies. </LI> <LI> Promising results have been achieved for infant brain MR images aged from 2-week-old to 1-year-old. </LI> <LI> The proposed technique can be very useful for many ongoing early brain development studies. </LI> </UL> </P>

A novel relational regularization feature selection method for joint regression and classification in AD diagnosis

Zhu, Xiaofeng,Suk, Heung-Il,Wang, Li,Lee, Seong-Whan,Shen, Dinggang Elsevier 2017 Medical image analysis Vol.38 No.-

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>In this paper, we focus on joint regression and classification for Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and propose a new feature selection method by embedding the relational information inherent in the observations into a sparse multi-task learning framework. Specifically, the relational information includes three kinds of relationships (such as feature-feature relation, response–response relation, and sample-sample relation), for preserving three kinds of the similarity, such as for the features, the response variables, and the samples, respectively. To conduct feature selection, we first formulate the objective function by imposing these three relational characteristics along with an ℓ<SUB>2,1</SUB>-norm regularization term, and further propose a computationally efficient algorithm to optimize the proposed objective function. With the dimension-reduced data, we train two support vector regression models to predict the clinical scores of ADAS-Cog and MMSE, respectively, and also a support vector classification model to determine the clinical label. We conducted extensive experiments on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experimental results showed the efficacy of the proposed method in enhancing the performances of both clinical scores prediction and disease status identification, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.</P> <P><B>Highlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> A novel graph feature selection method for the AD/MCI diagnosis. </LI> <LI> A novel regularization exploiting the relational information inherent in the observations. </LI> <LI> First work considering three relationships for joint classification and regression. </LI> <LI> High accuracy of 95.7% for AD classification and 79.9% for MCI classification. </LI> </UL> </P> <P><B>Graphical abstract</B></P> <P>[DISPLAY OMISSION]</P>

Preparation and Characterization of Anti-GP73 Monoclonal Antibodies and Development of Double-antibody Sandwich ELISA

Li, Qi-Wen,Chen, Hong-Bing,Li, Zhi-Yang,Shen, Peng,Qu, Li-Li,Gong, Lai-Ling,Xu, Hong-Pan,Pang, Lu,Si, Jin Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2015 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.16 No.5

Background: Serum Golgi protein 73 (GP73) as a novel and potential marker for diagnosing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have been found to be elevated in HCC patients and associated with clinical variables representing tumor growth and invasiveness. The aim of this study was to prepare a pair of monoclonal antibodys (mAbs) against GP73 and develop a newly designed double-antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (s-ELISA), which would be used in the detection of serum GP73 (sGP73) as well as in the diagnosis of HCC. Materials and Methods: Produced by prokaryotic expression, the purified recombinant GP73 (rGP73), produced by prokaryotic expression, was used to immunize the Balb/c mice. Two hybridoma cell lines against GP73 were obtained by fusing mouse Sp2/0 myeloma cells with spleen cells from the immunized mice. The titers of anti-GP73 mAb reached 1:243,000. Western blotting analysis and Immunohistochemistry staining revealed that anti-GP73 mAb could recognize GP73 protein. The double-antibody s-ELISA was successfully established and validated by 119 HCC and 103 normal serum samples. Results: showed that the detection limit of this method could reach 1.56 ng/ml, and sGP73 levels in HCC group (mean=190.6 ng/ml) were much higher than those of in healthy controls (mean=70.92 ng/ml). Conclusions: Results of our study not only showed that sGP73 levels of HCC patients were significantly higher than those of healthy controls, but also indicated that the laboratory homemade anti-GP73 mAbs could be the optimal tool used in evaluating sGP73 levels, which would provide a solid foundation for subsequent clinical applications.

Neutrophil Count and the Inflammation-based Glasgow Prognostic Score Predict Survival in Patients with Advanced Gastric Cancer Receiving First-line Chemotherapy

Li, Qing-Qing,Lu, Zhi-Hao,Yang, Li,Lu, Ming,Zhang, Xiao-Tian,Li, Jian,Zhou, Jun,Wang, Xi-Cheng,Gong, Ji-Fang,Gao, Jing,Li, Jie,Li, Yan,Shen, Lin Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2014 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.15 No.2

Purpose: To explore the value of systemic inflammatory markers as independent prognostic factors and the extent these markers improve prognostic classification for patients with inoperable advanced or metastatic gastric cancer (GC) receiving palliative chemotherapy. Methods: We studied the prognostic value of systemic inflammatory factors such as circulating white blood cell count and its components as well as that combined to form inflammation-based prognostic scores (Glasgow Prognostic Score (GPS), Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratio (NLR), Platelet Lymphocyte Ratio (PLR), Prognostic Index (PI) and Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI)) in 384 patients with inoperable advanced or metastatic gastric cancer (GC) receiving first-line chemotherapy. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to examine the impact of inflammatory markers on overall survival (OS). Results: Univariate analysis revealed that an elevated white blood cell, neutrophil and/or platelet count, a decreased lymphocyte count, a low serum albumin concentration, and high CRP concentration, as well as elevated NLR/PLR, GPS, PI, PNI were significant predictors of shorter OS. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that only elevated neutrophil count (HR 3.696, p=0.003) and higher GPS (HR 1.621, p=0.01) were independent predictors of poor OS. Conclusion: This study demonstrated elevated pretreatment neutrophil count and high GPS to be independent predictors of shorter OS in inoperable advanced or metastatic GC patients treated with first-line chemotherapy. Upon validation of these data in independent studies, stratification of patients using these markers in future clinical trials is recommended.

Oxymatrine Causes Hepatotoxicity by Promoting the Phosphorylation of JNK and Induction of Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Mediated by ROS in LO2 Cells

Li-li Gu,Zhe-lun Shen,Yang-Lei Li,Yi-Qi Bao,Hong Lu 한국분자세포생물학회 2018 Molecules and cells Vol.41 No.5

Oxymatrine (OMT) often used in treatment for chronic hepatitis B virus infection in clinic. However, OMT–induced liver injury has been reported. In this study, we aim to investigate the possible mechanism of OMT-induced hepatotoxicity in human normal liver cells (L02). Exposed cells to OMT, the cell viability was decreased and apoptosis rate increased, the intracellular markers of oxidative stress were changed. Simultaneously, OMT altered apoptotic related proteins levels, including Bcl-2, Bax and pro-caspase-8/-9/-3. In addition, OMT enhanced the protein levels of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress makers (GRP78/Bip, CHOP, and cleaved-Caspase-4) and phosphorylation of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (p-JNK), as well as the mRNA levels of GRP78/Bip, CHOP, caspase-4, and ER stress sensors (IREI, ATF6, and PERK). Pre-treatment with Z-VAD-fmk, JNK inhibitor SP600125 and N-acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC), a ROS scavenger, partly improved the survival rates and restored OMT-induced cellular damage, and reduced caspase-3 cleavage. SP600125 or NAC reduced OMT-induced p-JNK and NAC significantly lowered caspase-4. Furthermore, 4-PBA, the ER stress inhibitor, weakened inhibitory effect of OMT on cells, on the contrary, TM worsen. 4-PBA also reduced the levels of p-JNK and cleaved-caspase-3 proteins. Therefore, OMT-induced injury in L02 cells was related to ROS mediated p-JNK and ER stress induction. Antioxidant, by inhibition of p-JNK or ER stress, may be a feasible method to alleviate OMT-induced liver injury.

Oxymatrine Causes Hepatotoxicity by Promoting the Phosphorylation of JNK and Induction of Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Mediated by ROS in LO2 Cells

Gu, Li-li,Shen, Zhe-lun,Li, Yang-Lei,Bao, Yi-Qi,Lu, Hong Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology 2018 Molecules and cells Vol.41 No.5

Oxymatrine (OMT) often used in treatment for chronic hepatitis B virus infection in clinic. However, OMT-induced liver injury has been reported. In this study, we aim to investigate the possible mechanism of OMT-induced hepatotoxicity in human normal liver cells (L02). Exposed cells to OMT, the cell viability was decreased and apoptosis rate increased, the intracellular markers of oxidative stress were changed. Simultaneously, OMT altered apoptotic related proteins levels, including Bcl-2, Bax and pro-caspase-8/-9/-3. In addition, OMT enhanced the protein levels of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress makers (GRP78/Bip, CHOP, and cleaved-Caspase-4) and phosphorylation of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (p-JNK), as well as the mRNA levels of GRP78/Bip, CHOP, caspase-4, and ER stress sensors (IREI, ATF6, and PERK). Pre-treatment with Z-VAD-fmk, JNK inhibitor SP600125 and N-acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC), a ROS scavenger, partly improved the survival rates and restored OMT-induced cellular damage, and reduced caspase-3 cleavage. SP600125 or NAC reduced OMT-induced p-JNK and NAC significantly lowered caspase-4. Furthermore, 4-PBA, the ER stress inhibitor, weakened inhibitory effect of OMT on cells, on the contrary, TM worsen. 4-PBA also reduced the levels of p-JNK and cleaved-caspase-3 proteins. Therefore, OMT-induced injury in L02 cells was related to ROS mediated p-JNK and ER stress induction. Antioxidant, by inhibition of p-JNK or ER stress, may be a feasible method to alleviate OMT-induced liver injury.

Optimal design method for LLCL filters based on NSGA-III

Li, Baojin,Huang, Songtao,Ye, Jie,Li, Yesong,Shen, Anwen,Deng, Junli The Korean Institute of Power Electronics 2020 JOURNAL OF POWER ELECTRONICS Vol.20 No.5

The LLCL filter is usually used as a switching ripple suppressor since it can attenuate switching-frequency current harmonics much better than an LCL filter using lower total inductance and capacitance. However, it is more difficult to design LLCL parameters. In addition, it has a number of initial design constraints: the fundamental reactive power, the resonant frequency f_res, etc. are coupled and always contradictory, which means that designing the parameters is a Many-objective optimization problem (MaOP). The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III) does well in solving this kind of problem. In recent studies, the proposed methods only provide a range of parameters. Thus, obtaining certain parameters relies on experience, and using the boundary value cannot be proved optimal. However, using original NSGA-III is somewhat time-consuming for achieving specific parameters. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a novel optimal design method for an LLCL filter based on NSGA-III with the handling of constraints. The proposed method gives a set of specific parameters and achieves a high computing efficiency. The proposed method is verified through simulations and a grid-connected inverter system based on a virtual instrument to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.