Background/Aims: Coronary heart disease is characterized by vascular stenosis or occlusion resulting in myocardial ischemia, hypoxia and necrosis. In China, the combination of aspirin and Fufang Danshen Diwan (FDD), a traditional Chinese medicine formula, has been suggested in the treatment of coronary heart disease. There have been several studies comparing the effectiveness of aspirin alone and in combination with FDD to treat coronary artery disease; however, it remains unclear whether combined aspirin therapy is superior. This study was thus designed to clarify this issue through a systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods: Databases including PubMed, EMBASE, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, Wanfang Data and VIP Information were searched. Papers were reviewed systematically by two researchers and analyzed using Cochrane software Revman 5.1. Results: Fourteen randomized controlled trials enrolling 1367 subjects were included. Meta-analyses revealed that aspirin in combination with FDD was significantly more effective at alleviating angina pectoris and improving electrocardiogram (ECG) results relative to aspirin therapy alone, reflected by the summary effects for the clinical markedly effective (OR = 2.45; 95% CI 1.95-3.08) and the total effective (OR = 3.92; 95% CI 2.87-5.36) rates. In addition, combined aspirin and FDD was significantly more efficacious than aspirin monotherapy at improving blood lipid levels, as indicated by the following outcomes: 1) reduction of TC level (SMD −1.12; 95% CI −1.49 to −0.76); 2) reduction of TG level (SMD −0.94; 95% CI −1.15 to -0.74); 3) reduction of LDL level (SMD -0.68; 95% CI -0.88 to -0.48); and 4) improvement of HDL level (SMD 0.52; 95% CI 0.04 to 0.99 ). No serious adverse events were reported in any of the included trials. Conclusion: The present meta-analysis demonstrated that aspirin in combination with FDD was more effective than aspirin alone for treating coronary heart disease. More full-scale randomized clinical trials with reliable designs are recommended to further evaluate the clinical benefits and long-term effectiveness of FDD for the treatment of coronary heart disease.

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<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a sensing technique with which conductivity distribution can be reconstructed. It should be mentioned that the reconstruction is a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Currently, the regularization method has been an effective approach to deal with this problem. Especially, total variation regularization method is advantageous over Tikhonov method as the edge information can be well preserved. Nevertheless, the reconstructed image shows severe staircase effect. In this work, to enhance the quality of reconstruction, a novel hybrid regularization model which combines a total generalized variation method with a wavelet frame approach (TGV-WF) is proposed. An efficient mean doubly augmented Lagrangian algorithm has been developed to solve the TGV-WF model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical simulation and experimental validation are conducted for imaging conductivity distribution. Furthermore, some comparisons are made with typical regularization methods. From the results, it can be found that the proposed method shows better performance in the reconstruction since the edge of the inclusion can be well preserved and the staircase effect is effectively relieved.</p>

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