A novel watermarking scheme is proposed that could substantially improve current watermarking techniques. This scheme exploits the features of micro images of watermarks to build association rules and embeds the rules into a host image instead of the bit stream of the watermark, which is commonly used in digital watermarking. Next, similar micro images with the same rules are collected or even created from the host image to simulate an extracted watermark. This method, called the features classification forest, can achieve blind extraction and is adaptable to any watermarking scheme using a quantization-based mechanism. Furthermore, a larger size watermark can be accepted without an adverse effect on the imperceptibility of the host image. The experiments demonstrate the successful simulation of watermarks and the application to five different watermarking schemes. One of them is slightly adjusted from a reference to especially resist JPEG compression, and the others show native advantages to resist different image processing attacks.

Myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury is marked by rapid increase in inflammation and not only results in myocardial apoptosis but also compromises the myocardial function. Dunaliella salina (D. salina), a halophilic unicellular microalga, has been used as a provitamin A carotenoid supplement and color additive. Several studies have reported that D. salina extract could attenuate lipopolysaccharides-induced inflammatory effects and regulate the virus-induced inflammatory response in macrophages. However, the effects of D. salina on myocardial I/R injury remain unknown. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the cardioprotection of D. salina extract in rats subjected to myocardial I/R injury that was induced by occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery for 1 h followed by 3 h of reperfusion. Compared with the vehicle group, the myocardial infarct size significantly decreased in rats that were pre-treated with D. salina. D. salina significantly attenuated the expressions of TLR4, COX-2 and the activity of STAT1, JAK2, IκB, NF-κB. Furthermore, D. salina significantly inhibited the activation of caspase-3 and the levels of Beclin-1, p62, LC3-I/II. This study is the first to report that the cardioprotective effects of D. salina may mediate anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic activities and decrease autophagy through the TLR4-mediated signaling pathway to antagonize myocardial I/R injury.

Flexor pollicis longus (FPL) tendon rupture is a debilitating condition that can impair hand function. This case series study aimed to evaluate the outcomes of FPL tendon rupture and subsequent palmaris longus (PL) tendon graft reconstruction. Three cases of FPL tendon rupture in patients who had previously undergone open reduction and internal fixation with a volar plate were included. The surgical intervention involved volar plate removal, tenolysis and PL tendon graft reconstruction. Follow-up assessments showed gradual improvement in wrist function, with no post-operative complications or infections observed. These findings suggest that PL tendon grafting can be an effective surgical technique for FPL tendon rupture. Further research is needed to determine optimal surgical approaches and post-operative rehabilitation protocols for this condition.

In this paper, we consider the problem of how to design a minimal perfect hashing function which is suitable for the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols system. Our main idea is inspired by Chang’s letter-oriented minimal perfect hashing scheme. By using our hashing function, 1303 Mandarin phonetic symbol transcriptions will be hashed to 1303 locations in the way of one-to-one correspondence.

Digital watermarking technique is a common solution to image authentication and authorization. Numerous researches in this area use modification method to alter the pixel value or the coefficients of transform domain to succeed the watermarking purpose. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking scheme using the concept of association rules to build a features classification tree and Chinese remainder theorem to embed the index of the tree instead of watermark's native values, and via the inverse process the watermark extraction is accomplished. Additionally, it has application ability to any watermarking techniques in the same principle of modification method. Our experimental results show not only the robustness against different image processing attacks, but also the enlargement of capacity to progressively accept the gray scale watermark.