No abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative condition causing significant disability and thus negatively impacting quality of life. The recent advent of stem cell-based therapy has heralded the prospect of a potential restorative treatment option for PD. In particular, mesenchymal stem cells derived from human umbilical cord (hUC-MSCs) have great potential for developing a therapeutic agent as such. Furthermore, hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), which shows mitogenic and morphogenetic activities in a variety of cells, including MSC, and may be implicated in the pathophysiology of PD. As such, HGF may represent a new therapeutic target for the disease. In this study, we successfully isolated and facilitated the transduction of an adenoviral vector expressing HGF (Ad-HGF) into isolated hUC-MSCs. Following transduction, the hUC-MSCs can differentiate into dopaminergic neuron-like cells secreting dopamine, tyrosine hydroxylase, and dopamine transporter. Our data suggest that hUC-MSCs have the ability to differentiate into dopaminergic neurons after transduction with Ad-HGF, providing encouraging evidence to further explore this approach to the treatment of PD.

No abstract

Spectral CT imaging parameters (IC, NIC, and λ ) in AP provide improved accuracy for evaluating the degrees of differentiation in colon cancer than CT number at 70 keV.

Both ASiR and ASiR-V improved the objective and subjective image quality for routine liver CT compared with FBP. ASiR-V provided further image quality improvement with higher acceptable percentage than ASiR, and ASiR-V60% had the highest image quality score. Advances in knowledge: (1) Both ASiR and ASiR-V significantly reduce image noise compared with conventional FBP reconstruction. (2) ASiR-V with 60 blending percentage provides the highest image quality score in routine liver CT.