Fibroblasts are predominant components of mammary stromal cells and play crucial roles in the development and involution of bovine mammary gland; however, whether these cells contribute to mastitis has not been demonstrated. Thus, we have undertaken biological and molecular characterization of inflammation-associated fibroblasts (INFs) extracted from bovine mammary glands with clinical mastitis and normal fibroblasts (NFs) from slaughtered dairy cows because of fractured legs during lactation. The functional contributions of INFs to normal epithelial cells were also investigated by using an in vitro co-culture model. We present evidence that the INFs were activated fibroblasts and showed inflammation-related features. Moreover, INFs significantly inhibited the proliferation and β-casein secretion of epithelial cells, as well as upregulated the expression of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-8 in epithelial cells. These findings indicate that functional alterations can occur in stromal fibroblasts within the bovine mammary gland during mastitis, demonstrating the importance of stromal fibroblasts in bovine mastitis and its treatment.

Geometry calibration is a vital step for describing the geometry of a cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) system and is a prerequisite for CBCT reconstruction. In current methods, calibration phantom commission and geometry calibration are divided into two independent tasks. Small errors in ball-bearing (BB) positioning in the phantom-making step will severely degrade the quality of phantom calibration. To solve this problem, we propose an integrated method to simultaneously realize geometry phantom commission and geometry calibration. Instead of assuming the accuracy of the geometry phantom, the integrated method considers BB centers in the phantom as an optimized parameter in the workflow. Specifically, an evaluation phantom and the corresponding evaluation contrast index are used to evaluate geometry artifacts for optimizing the BB coordinates in the geometry phantom. After utilizing particle swarm optimization, the CBCT geometry and BB coordinates in the geometry phantom are calibrated accurately and are then directly used for the next geometry calibration task in other CBCT systems. To evaluate the proposed method, both qualitative and quantitative studies were performed on simulated and realistic CBCT data. The spatial resolution of reconstructed images using dental CBCT can reach up to 15 line pair cm. The proposed method is also superior to the Wiesent method in experiments. This paper shows that the proposed method is attractive for simultaneous and accurate geometry phantom commission and geometry calibration.

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The selection of calculation parameters for slope excavation support design and the analysis of seepage stability is a significant challenge. This difficulty also hinders the development of slope support engineering. This study examined the right binary structure slope engineering of the K5 + 220–K5 + 770 section of the TJ1A mark of the Jiangkou-Weng'an Highway in Guizhou province. In this study, we propose and use the deep displacement monitoring data and P value test method to check the simulation parameters. Furthermore, the superposition calculation method for steady-state seepage analysis of slope geotechnical structure is proposed. A comparative analysis of the displacement, strain, stress, and safety factor of the slope after the application of pore water pressure was carried out for three slope conditions. The analysis showed that steady-state seepage has a significant effect on the displacement of the slope during the completion of excavation. As a result, a continuous distribution of strain arises on the slope along the interface between the potential sliding surface and the rock–soil layer, and then forms a continuous sliding zone. Additionally, steady-state seepage has a significant effect on the position of the displacement distribution during the initial support of the slope, leading to a significant increase in the extreme value of the shear outlet displacement of the potential slip surface of the slope and in the extreme value of equivalent strain. Finally, steady-state seepage reduces the displacement and equivalent strain upon construction of the secondary slope support. The steady-state seepage has a limited effect on the stress concentration, but reduces the safety factor calculated using the strength reduction method, in all three stages of slope excavation and support. This study enriches the analysis methods for determining the stability of a dual-structure slope during the rainy season, and provides new ideas for the safety and control of slope support projects.

Abstract. Low-dose computed tomography reconstruction is an important issue in the medical imaging domain. Sparse-view has been widely studied as a potential strategy. Compressed sensing (CS) method has shown great potential to reconstruct high-quality CT images from sparse-view projection data. Nonetheless, low-contrast structures tend to be blurred by the total variation (TV, L 1 -norm of the gradient image) regularization. Moreover, TV will produce blocky effects on smooth and edge regions. To overcome this limitation, this study has proposed an iterative image reconstruction algorithm by combining L 1 regularization and smoothed L 0 (SL 0 ) regularization. SL 0 is a smooth approximation of L 0 norm and can solve the problem of L 0 norm being sensitive to noise. To evaluate the proposed method, both qualitative and quantitative studies were conducted on a digital Shepp-Logan phantom and a real head phantom. Experimental comparative results have indicated that the proposed L 1 /SL 0 -POCS algorithm can effectively suppress noise and artifacts, as well as preserve more structural information compared to other existing methods.