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Traditional methods to treat colorectal cancer require surgeries, which result in large wound surface. In this study, a flexible tubing was introduced as a cold plasma generator and also a magnetic resonance (MR) imaging antenna to guide plasma for rectal wall treatment in vivo. A healthy rabbit was used to test the feasibility of the two-in-one technique. The safety of plasma was verified by hematoxylin-eosin staining to characterize the rectal tissue. Results showed that the tubing could be not only ignited in vivo, but also be tracked accurately by MR images. And after 15 min treatment, there exhibited no unacceptable damage for rectal cells. In conclusion, this combined device could be feasible for the navigated plasma treatment and provide a valuable tool for potential colorectal cancer treatment in the future.

Polysaccharides extracted from Agrocybe aegerita (AAPS) have various physiological effects. In this study, we used the naturally aging Drosophila melanogaster and D-galactose-induced aging mice as animal models to study the anti-aging effects of AAPS via the alleviation of oxidative stress and regulation of gut microbiota. Results showed that AAPS could significantly prolong lifespan and alleviate oxidative stress induced by H2O2 of Drosophila melanogaster. In addition, AAPS significantly increased the activities of antioxidant enzymes in Drosophila melanogaster and mice, and reduced the content of MDA. Furthermore, AAPS reshaped the disordered intestinal flora, increased the abundance ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes, and increased the abundance of beneficial bacteria Lactobacillus. Our results demonstrated that AAPS had good antioxidant and potential anti-aging effects in vivo.

The aim of this study is to fabricate and test a novel flexible flat cable antenna (FFCA) for MRI of the knee at different flexion angles. The FFCA was made of a flat cable, a tuning/matching circuit and a signal transmission line. To test its feasibility and validity, in vitro and in vivo experiments were carried out on a 3.0 T MR scanner. The in vitro experiment suggested that the proposed FFCA could achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 336, while the SNR of an eight-channel knee coil was 291, and phantom images from the FFCA are homogeneously distributed. In the in vivo experiment, the FFCA had a higher SNR of 169 in the region of interest and more than 48.5 cm of longitudinal coverage, while the corresponding values for the commercial coil were 153 and 22.5 cm. Finally, five sagittal knee images at different flexion angles were acquired. The FFCA could acquire satisfactory knee images at different flexion angles, with the advantages of simplicity, low cost, large field of view and high SNR. It may therefore be further used to improve MR image quality of the knee joint.

Distantly-supervised relation extraction is expected to extract relational facts from very large corpora. However, it is inevitably accompanied by the problem of mislabeling, which affects the performance of relation extraction. To obtain richer information from sentences and make full use of the information of entity pairs, we propose the combined networks containing piecewise convolutional neural networks (PCNN) and bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRU) with multi-level attention. In this model, PCNN and BiGRU are utilized to obtain local features and sequence information. Then the multi-level attention is proposed to extract the most correlated information, which can affect the assignment of sentence attention weight. And it reduces the influence of wrong labeled instances indirectly. The experimental results show that our method can enhance the representation power of the network and prove the effectiveness of our model compared with several baseline methods.