Children undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) operations have an increased risk for the development of immunosuppression and severe infection. Lymphocyte apoptosis plays an important role in regulating immune responses. This study aimed to investigate the effect of open heart surgery with CPB on peripheral blood lymphocyte (PBL) apoptosis and the possible mechanism of lymphocyte apoptosis in infants and young children. This study enrolled 20 consecutive infants and children as a CPB group and 20 age-matched children who underwent patent arterial duct closure without CPB as control subjects. Samples were taken from peripheral blood after induction of anesthesia (preoperatively) and again 24 h after the operations. The degree of apoptosis and the expression level of Fas (CD95) on PBL were measured using flow cytometry. The percentage of lymphocyte apoptosis significantly increased after surgery in both groups, but it was much higher in the children with CPB than in those without CPB (14.46%+/-4.83% vs. 7.33%+/-1.43%; p<0.01). The expression level of Fas in the individuals with CPB was significantly higher than in those without CPB (52.80%+/-8.80% vs. 37.82%+/-6.32%; p<0.01). As shown by the study findings, both surgical stress and CPB can induce PBL apoptosis, which may lead to lymphopenia after open heart surgery with CPB for infants and young children.

This paper presents a high dynamic range (HDR) image zero watermarking method based on dual tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) and quaternion. In order to be against tone mapping (TM), DT-CWT is used to transform the three RGB color channels of the HDR image for obtaining the low-pass sub-bands, respectively, since DT-CWT can extract the contour of the HDR image and the contour change of the HDR image is small after TM. The HDR image provides a wide dynamic range, and thus, three-color channel correlations are higher than inner-relationships and the quaternion is used to consider three color channels as a whole to be transformed. Quaternion fast Fourier transform (QFFT) and quaternion singular value decomposition (QSVD) are utilized to decompose the HDR image for obtaining robust features, which is fused with a binary watermark to generate a zero watermark for copyright protection. Furthermore, the binary watermark is scrambled for the security by using the Arnold transform. Experimental results denote that the proposed zero-watermarking method is robust to TM and other image processing attacks, and can protect the HDR image efficiently.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune and neurodegenerative disease driven by inflammation and demyelination in the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerve. Optic neuritis, characterized by inflammation and demyelination of the optic nerve, is a symptom in many patients with MS. The optic nerve is the highway for visual information transmitted from the retina to the brain. It contains axons from the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) that reside in the retina, myelin forming oligodendrocytes and resident microglia and astrocytes. Inflammation, demyelination, and axonal degeneration are also present in the optic nerve of mice subjected to experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a preclinical mouse model of MS. Monitoring the optic nerve in EAE is a useful strategy to study the presentation and progression of pathology in the visual system; however, current approaches have relied on sectioning, staining and manual quantification. Further, information regarding the spatial load of lesions and inflammation is dependent on the area of sectioning. To better characterize cellular pathology in the EAE model, we employed a tissue clearing and 3D immunolabelling and imaging protocol to observe patterns of immune cell infiltration and activation throughout the optic nerve. Increased density of TOPRO staining for nuclei captured immune cell infiltration and Iba1 immunostaining was employed to monitor microglia and macrophages. Axonal degeneration was monitored by neurofilament immunolabelling to reveal axonal swellings throughout the optic nerve. In parallel, we developed a convolutional neural network with a UNet architecture (CNN-UNet) called BlebNet for automated identification and quantification of axonal swellings in whole mount optic nerves. Together this constitutes a toolkit for 3-dimensional immunostaining to monitor general optic nerve pathology and fast automated quantification of axonal defects that could also be adapted to monitor axonal degeneration and inflammation in other neurodegenerative disease models.

Brookfield Viscometer, Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR) and Bending Beam Rheometer (BBR) are employed to analyze properties of rubber asphalt and TOR rubber asphalt after water aging. Through simulating, the influences of parameter changes of water on the performances of asphalts after aging were studied. The results show that the PH value and sodium chloride content of water affects the aging properties of asphalt, and as the parameter changes, the high temperature performance of TOR rubber asphalt are better than rubber asphalt. DSR and BBR tests reveal that the higher the acidity (or the lower PH value) and the sodium chloride content of water are, the more seriously rubber asphalt and TOR rubber asphalt age in water aging; the lower the temperature is, the larger the S value and the smaller the m value become, and the worse the low temperature performance and dissipation of temperature stress of rubber asphalt and TOR rubber asphalt get.