Polyethylene glycol is a synthetic, biodegradable, and water-soluble polyether. Owing to its good biological and material properties, polyethylene glycol shows promise in spinal cord tissue engineering applications. Although studies have examined repairing spinal cord injury with polyethylene glycol, these compelling findings have not been recently reviewed or evaluated as a whole. Thus, we herein review and summarize the findings of studies conducted both within and beyond China that have examined the repair of spinal cord injury using polyethylene glycol. The following summarizes the results of studies using polyethylene glycol alone as well as coupled with polymers or hydrogels: (1) polyethylene glycol as an adjustable biomolecule carrier resists nerve fiber degeneration, reduces the inflammatory response, inhibits vacuole and scar formation, and protects nerve membranes in the acute stage of spinal cord injury. (2) Polyethylene glycol-coupled polymers not only promote angiogenesis but also carry drugs or bioactive molecules to the injury site. Because such polymers cross both the blood-spinal cord and blood-brain barriers, they have been widely used as drug carriers. (3) Polyethylene glycol hydrogels have been used as supporting substrates for the growth of stem cells after injury, inducing cell migration, proliferation, and differentiation. Simultaneously, polyethylene glycol hydrogels isolate or reduce local glial scar invasion, promote and guide axonal regeneration, cross the transplanted area, and re-establish synaptic connections with target tissue, thereby promoting spinal cord repair. On the basis of the reviewed studies, we conclude that polyethylene glycol is a promising synthetic material for use in the repair of spinal cord injury
Overnutrition is a risk factor for various human diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic disorders, and cancers. Therefore, targeting overnutrition represents a simple but attractive strategy for the treatment of these increasing public health threats. Fasting as a dietary intervention for combating overnutrition has been extensively studied. Fasting has been practiced for millennia, but only recently have its roles in the molecular clock, gut microbiome, and tissue homeostasis and function emerged. Fasting can slow aging in most species and protect against various human diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic disorders, and cancers. These centuried and unfading adventures and explorations suggest that fasting has the potential to delay aging and help prevent and treat diseases while minimizing side effects caused by chronic dietary interventions. In this review, recent animal and human studies concerning the role and underlying mechanism of fasting in physiology and pathology are summarized, the therapeutic potential of fasting is highlighted, and the combination of pharmacological intervention and fasting is discussed as a new treatment regimen for human diseases.
Phase unwrapping is an important procedure in digital image and signal processing, and has been widely used in many fields, such as optical and microwave interferometry, magnetic resonance imaging, synthetic aperture radar, adaptive optics. Phase unwrapping is a time consuming process with large amount of calculations and complicated data dependency. A number of algorithms with different features have been developed to solve this problem. Among all of them, Goldstein's algorithm is one of the most widely used algorithms, and has been included in some standard libraries (such as MATLAB). In this paper we propose an innovative implementation of Goldstein's algorithm on GPU. Several important approaches and optimizations are proposed for the GPU algorithm. For example, by introducing a localmatching step, we were able to parallelize the branchcut step efficiently, getting much better performance than existing work. With a cascaded propagation model, another important operation in the algorithm, f loodf ill, is able to make good use of the computing power of GPU. We tested our GPU algorithm on NVIDIA C2050 and K20 GPUs, and achieved speedup of up to 781 and 896 over the CPU implementation respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best performance of unwrap ever achieved on GPUs.
A numerical simulator of a turbulence phase screen based on turbulence power spectrum density is described in this paper. The low-frequency adding technique used in the fast-Fourier-transform-based method is extended to the whole frequency domain. The frequency range and spatial coordinates are no longer limited by the spatial sampling, so that the phase screens can be applied in the multibeam time-dependent scenario. Several spectrums can be applied in this simulator. The structure function, modulation transfer function, and variance of the Zernike coefficient are calculated with the Kolmogorov model for validation. The simulation results have shown good agreement with the theoretical results.
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