AIM:To examine the relationship between the gene defect,change of protein hydrophobicity,spacial structure change and clinical phenotypes of Duchenne muscular dystrophy(DMD),and to explore the molecular pathogenesis of DMD.METHODS:The gene sequences of 59 cases of DMD/BMD patients with deletion from mutation were analyzed.The relationship between the protein hydrophobicity,3D-spacial structure and clinical phenotypes was examined by biological informatic technology.RESULTS:50 cases of frameshift mutation were all DMD.In other 5 cases with codon mutation that involved the 3rd hydrophobic region,4 cases were diagnosed as DMD and the rest one was BMD.The exon 3 deletion leaded to the intortion of dystrophin N-terminal,which in turn affected the combination of dystrophin and troponin resulting in the DMD pathopoiesis.CONCLUSION:The severity of clinical phenotypes of muscular dystrophy diseases is related to whether the deletion destroys the reading frame,involves the 3rd hydrophobic region or changes the protein special structure.The biological informatic technology provides a new potential research methodology for studying the pathogenesis of DMD.

OBJECTIVEAccurate segmentation of lung fields in chest radiographs (CXR) is very useful for automatic analysis of CXR. In this work, we propose to use dense matching of local features and label fusion to automatically segment the lung fields in CXR.

METHODSFor an input CXR, the dense Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors and raw image patches were extracted as the local features for each pixel. The nearest neighbors of the local features were then quickly searched by dense matching directly from the whole feature dataset of the reference images. The dense matching included three steps: limited random initialization, propagation of nearest neighbor field, and limited random search, with iteration of the last two steps for several times. The label image patches for each pixel were extracted according to the nearest neighbor field and weighted by the matching similarity. Finally, the weighted label patches were rearranged as the label class probability image of the input CXR, from which thresholds were obtained for segmentation of the lung fields.

RESULTSThe Jaccard index of the proposed method reached 95.5% on the public JSRT dataset.

CONCLUSIONA high accuracy and robustness can be obtained by adopting dense matching of local features and label fusion to segment the lung fields in CXR, and the result is better than that of current segmentation method.

Algorithms ; Cluster Analysis ; Humans ; Lung ; Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted ; Radiography, Thoracic

ObjectiveTo analyze the research status and trends in low-level occupational benzene exposure. Methods Articles on low-level occupational benzene exposure from Chinese and English journals from January 1st, 2000, to December 31th, 2022 were retrieved using the Web of Science and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and a bibliometric analysis was conducted. Results A total of 327 articles were included in the analysis, comprising 216 English articles and 111 Chinese articles. i) The number of articles published in English fluctuates greatly over the years, without a trend of continuous growth or decline. Authors from 359 research institutions in 45 countries and regions have published relevant English articles in 97 kinds of journals, involving 281 grants from 226 foundations. The top three countries in terms of articles amount were the United States, Italy, and China, with 81, 46, and 43 papers, respectively. The English articles mainly focused on mechanistic research at the genetic level, such as hematotoxicity, oxidative stress, and DNA damage. ii) The number of Chinese articles increased gradually after 2012, with the growth peak in 2017. Authors from 127 research institutions in 26 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities published Chinese articles in 51 kinds of journals, involving 154 grants from 78 foundations. Chinese articles tended to focus on benzene-induced hematotoxicity and occupational health damage. Conclusion Most studies on low-level occupational benzene exposure were conducted in China, the United States and Italy, focused on hematotoxicity. Monitoring international research topics and hotspots of the field has certain reference value for related research in China.

Lymphatic metastasis is the main metastatic route for colorectal cancer, which increases the risk of cancer recurrence and distant metastasis. The properties of the lymph node metastatic colorectal cancer (LNM-CRC) cells are poorly understood, and effective therapies are still lacking. Here, we found that hypoxia-induced fibroblast activation protein alpha (FAPα) expression in LNM-CRC cells. Gain- or loss-function experiments demonstrated that FAPα enhanced tumor cell migration, invasion, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, stemness, and lymphangiogenesis via activation of the STAT3 pathway. In addition, FAPα in tumor cells induced extracellular matrix remodeling and established an immunosuppressive environment via recruiting regulatory T cells, to promote colorectal cancer lymph node metastasis (CRCLNM). Z-GP-DAVLBH, a FAPα-activated prodrug, inhibited CRCLNM by targeting FAPα-positive LNM-CRC cells. Our study highlights the role of FAPα in tumor cells in CRCLNM and provides a potential therapeutic target and promising strategy for CRCLNM.