BackgroundThe aim of this study was to explore the effect of baicalein on diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) rats and the mechanisms involved, and to determine the theoretical basis for clinical anti-tumor therapy.Material/MethodsDCM rat model was induced with a single injection of streptozotocin. Then, DCM rats were treated with baicalein alone or co-treated with baicalein and PI3K/Akt inhibitor. Myocardial pathological changes were detected by HE and Masson staining. The activities of SOD, GSH-Px, and MDA in myocardial tissue were measured by biochemical tests. The levels of TNF-α, IL-1β, and cTn-I were examined by ELISA. NADP+/NADPH ratio was measured with the NADP+/NADPH assay kit. RT-PCR was used to detect the levels of PI3K and Akt. The levels of Bax, Bcl-2, Caspase-3, GSK-3β, PI3K, and Akt were detected by Western blot.ResultsBaicalein could improve pathological injury. SOD and GSH-Px activity decreased while the level of MDA increased in myocardial tissue. Baicalein treatment enhanced SOD activity in a dose-dependent manner but markedly reduced MDA. Similar changes were observed in both serum inflammatory factors and the NADP+/NADPH ratio. After adding PI3K-Akt inhibitor, the levels of PI3K and Akt mRNA expression were significantly decreased, but were not significantly different from the DCM group. Levels of Bcl-2, PI3K, p-GSK-3β/GSK-3β, and p-Akt were decreased in the DCM group, while the levels of Bax and Caspase-3 were obviously increased.ConclusionsBaicalein can protect DCM rats against damage from oxidative stress and inflammation in myocardial tissue, and PI3K/Akt signaling pathway may be involved to mediating these effects.

Horizontal CollaborationFuzzy C-Means (HC-FCM) is a useful tool for dealing with collaborative clustering problems where a pattern-set is described in some different feature spaces independently and thus results in different data sets. By means of FCM, clustering may be carried on these different data sets and thus result in different partition matrices. For one of these data sets, how to take means of the clustering information of the other data sets to help its own clustering and thus to give a reasonable collaborative clustering result is a meaningful topic and becomes the aim of HC-FCM. Because of potential security and privacy restrictions, the clustering information can be provided only by partition matrices instead of the data sets themselves. This confines the manner of using the clustering information. In the original frame of HC-FCM given by W.Pedrycz, the partition matrices are directly introduced to the clustering algorithm without any preprocessing. In this paper, we will show the necessity of the preprocessing on the partition matrices and present an available method for the preprocessing. Some experiments are given to show the performance of the proposed method for preprocessing. With the work of this paper, the Horizontal Collaboration Fuzzy C-Means will be well carried on.

A new thresholding algorithm and its multi-threshold extension are presented to improve the performance of image segmentation. The probabilistic Rough set is used to portray the objects and backgrounds in image. The optimal threshold is given through a minimum boundary criterion. A new rough membership function is defined in the light of requirements of image thresholding.2008 International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Design 978-0-7695-3311-7/08 $25.00

In order to research the influence of the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beam with the incorporation of basalt fiber, four basalt fiber reinforced concrete beams with parameters of length and volume ratio were designed and made. The fiber lengths were 12mm and 30mm, and the volume ratios were 1‰ and 2‰. The test data of basalt fiber reinforced concrete was obtained through the shear experiments and comparison with the common reinforced concrete beam. The results of the experiment show that the cracking load of the basalt fiber reinforced concrete beam increase obviously with the growing of fiber characteristic parameters, and effectively reduce the diagonal crack width.