No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on people worldwide, and there are currently no specific antivirus drugs or vaccines. We report herein a therapeutic based on catalase, an antioxidant enzyme that can effectively breakdown hydrogen peroxide and minimize the downstream reactive oxygen species, which are excessively produced resulting from the infection and inflammatory process. Catalase assists to regulate production of cytokines, protect oxidative injury, and repress replication of SARS-CoV-2, as demonstrated in human leukocytes and alveolar epithelial cells, and rhesus macaques, without noticeable toxicity. Such a therapeutic can be readily manufactured at low cost as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

No abstract

In this paper, the iterative Retinex algorithm is improved to handle dynamic range compression problems. Based on the analysis of the McCann-Sobel algorithm, the iterative smoothing operation can be interpreted as an asymmetric diffusion. In order to characterized the sharp discontinuities in illumination, an edge-stopping function is introduced into the iterative procedure, which is inspired by anisotropic diffusion. Using the improved illumination estimator, dynamic range of images can be arbitrarily manipulated while suppressing undesirable artifacts. Experiments show that the proposed algorithms outperforms several derivatives for dynamic range compression based on the iterative Retinex.