No abstract

Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) can be used to study the body's response to vestibular stimuli. This study aimed to investigate whether postural responses to GVS were different between pilots and the general populace. Bilateral bipolar GVS was applied with a constant-current profile to 12 pilots and 12 control subjects via two electrodes placed over the mastoid processes. Both GVS threshold and the center of pressure's trajectory (COP's trajectory) were measured. Position variability of COP during spontaneous body sway and peak displacement of COP during GVS-induced body sway were calculated in the medial-lateral direction. Spontaneous body sway was slight for all subjects, and there was no significant difference in the value of COP position variability between the pilots and controls. Both the GVS threshold and magnitude of GVS-induced body deviation were similar for different GVS polarities. GVS thresholds were similar between the two groups, but the magnitude of GVS-induced body deviation in the controls was significantly larger than that in the pilots. The pilots showed less GVS-induced body deviation, meaning that pilots may have a stronger ability to suppress vestibular illusions.

Due to the designed, coagulation-promoting microstructure, a rapid and safe hemostat was developed and its hemostatic efficiency was evaluated by in vitro clotting tests and in vivo hemostatic analyses.

The kidney is vulnerable to hypoxia-induced injury. One of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon is cell apoptosis triggered by hypoxia-inducible factor-1-α (HIF-1α) activation. ) is known to be induced by HIF-1α and can regulate various pathological processes, but its role in hypoxic kidney injury remains unclear. Here, in both rat systemic hypoxia and local kidney hypoxia models, we found miR-210 levels were upregulated significantly in injured kidney, especially in renal tubular cells. A similar increase was observed in hypoxia-treated human renal tubular HK-2 cells. We also verified that miR-210 can directly suppress HIF-1α expression by targeting the 3′ untranslated region of HIF-1α mRNA in HK-2 cells in severe hypoxia. Accordingly, miR-210 overexpression caused significant inhibition of the HIF-1α pathway and attenuated apoptosis caused by hypoxia, while miR-210 knockdown exerted the opposite effect. Taken together, our findings verify that miR-210 is involved in the molecular response in hypoxic kidney lesions in vivo and attenuates hypoxia-induced renal tubular cell apoptosis by targeting HIF-1α directly and suppressing HIF-1α pathway activation in vitro.

A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition method is proposed in this study based on the dominant scattering area (DSA). DSA is a binary image recording the positions of the dominant scattering centers in the original SAR image. It can reflect the distribution of the scattering centers as well as the preliminary shape of the target, thus providing discriminative information for SAR target recognition. By subtracting the DSA of the test image with those of its corresponding templates from different classes, the DSA residues represent the differences between the test image and various classes. To further enhance the differences, the DSA residues are subject to the binary morphological filtering, i.e., the opening operation. Afterwards, a similarity measure is defined based on the filtered DSA residues after the binary opening operation. Considering the possible variations of the constructed DSA, several different structuring elements are used during the binary morphological filtering. And a score-level fusion is performed afterwards to obtain a robust similarity. By comparing the similarities between the test image and various template classes, the target label is determined to be the one with the maximum similarity. To validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and compared with several state-of-the-art SAR target recognition methods.