Adventitial Tertiary Lymphoid Organs as Potential Source of MicroRNA Biomarkers for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is an inflammatory disease associated with marked changes in the cellular composition of the aortic wall. This study aims to identify microRNA (miRNA) expression in aneurysmal inflammatory cells isolated by laser microdissection from human tissue samples. The distribution of inflammatory cells (neutrophils, B and T lymphocytes, mast cells) was evaluated in human AAA biopsies. We observed in half of the samples that adventitial tertiary lymphoid organs (ATLOs) with a thickness from 0.5 to 2 mm were located exclusively in the adventitia. Out of the 850 miRNA that were screened by microarray in isolated ATLOs (n = 2), 164 miRNAs were detected in ATLOs. The three miRNAs (miR-15a-3p, miR-30a-5p and miR-489-3p) with the highest expression levels were chosen and their expression quantified by RT-PCR in isolated ATLOs (n = 4), M1 (n = 2) and M2 macrophages (n = 2) and entire aneurysmal biopsies (n = 3). Except for the miR-30a-5p, a similar modulation was found in ATLOs and the two subtypes of macrophages. The modulated miRNAs were then evaluated in the plasma of AAA patients for their potential as AAA biomarkers. Our data emphasize the potential of miR-15a-3p and miR-30a-5p as biomarkers of AAA but also as triggers of ATLO evolution. Further investigations will be required to evaluate their targets in order to better understand AAA pathophysiology.     

基于随机光栅的可调谐随机光纤激光器

提出一种基于随机光栅与高反射布拉格光栅(FBG)相结合的可调谐随机光纤激光器。利用980nm泵浦光源泵浦一段7m长的掺铒光纤(EDF)进行增益放大,由随机光栅提供随机反馈。随机光栅长7cm,具有约10000个折射率修改点,这些点由飞秒激光逐点写入,并沿光纤方向随机分布,两点相邻间隔小于10μm。同时,利用中心波长为1548nm的高反射FBG来组成半开放腔结构,实现了随机激光的输出。实验测得的泵浦阈值功率仅为18mW,斜率效率高达13.2%,并通过改变FBG的中心波长,实现了输出激光波长的可调谐,调谐范围为4.45nm(1548.04~1552.49nm)。得益于半开放式激光腔的设计和EDF的高增益,整个系统具有阈值低、效率高、结构简单等优点。     

The influence of the waveguide on the quality of measurements with ultrasonic Doppler velocimetry

The article is devoted to the study of the influence of geometric parameters of sound-conducting walls on the quality of measurement of liquid metal flow velocities by ultrasonic Doppler velocimetry. It was shown that the thickness and radius of a sound-conducting wall (waveguide) have a notable effect on the resulting velocity profiles. The flow in a round pipe, the length of which is much larger than its diameter, is considered as a reference flow. The positive effect of a stepwise waveguides with a diameter smaller than the diameter of the piezoelectric element of an ultrasonic transducer on the quality of velocity measurements was verified experimentally. It was found that the accuracy of the resulting velocity profiles largely depends on the length and the material of the waveguides, as well as the velocity of the incoming flow of liquid metal.     

靶面激光光斑尺寸原位测量的研究

提供了一种简便易行的靶面激光光斑尺寸原位测量的方法。从高斯光束的横向光强分布特性出发,建立了激光烧蚀斑半径与辐照激光能量、光斑尺寸、烧蚀阈值间的关系式,模拟分析发现辐照激光光斑尺寸对烧蚀斑半径随辐照能量变化曲线有较大影响。对于脉宽为2 ms,波长为1064 nm的激光,实验测量了不同能量激光辐照下相纸烧蚀斑半径,并用推导出的关系式拟合测量数据,获得了靶面处光斑尺寸和样品烧蚀阈值。同时,也测量了不同位置处的光斑尺寸和样品烧蚀阈值,对高斯光束束腰位置和样品烧蚀阈值的光斑尺寸效应进行了验证。研究结果表明该技术结果可靠,简单高效。该技术可以为高能激光与固体物质相互作用的基础研究和激光加工等应用领域中实现简单方便地测量靶面光斑尺寸提供帮助。     

中子平衡节块离散纵标法及CMFD加速技术研究

本文基于横向积分离散纵标方程,解析得到横向积分通量中出射通量与入射通量的关系,并根据类似于扩散方程节块展开法的输运节块中子平衡方程形式,得到了一种高效的节块离散纵标法数值迭代策略。数值结果表明,本文提出的方法可行且数值结果正确。此外,粗网有限差分(CMFD)加速技术在节块离散纵标法中也取得了非常好的应用效果。     

基于2D激光扫描的基准检测技术研究

在机器人自动制孔系统中,基准孔检测的准确性会直接影响整个机器人制孔过程的位置精度。为获取基准孔孔位准确信息,采用激光扫描的方式对基准孔进行检测。设计了2D线激光扫描在基准平面内点云的三维转化方法,通过分析基准孔在扫描仪坐标系下点云的分布特点,提出了一种基于坐标差值的基准孔边界提取算法。通过设定相邻点云在线激光扫描仪坐标系下z轴的坐标差值获取边界点,实验验证该算法能有效地去除点云中的噪声点,获取准确的基准孔边缘特征信息,进而得到准确的基准孔孔位信息。     

小型机载激光通信系统设计与验证

针对空空宽带高速通信的需求，设计了小型化机载激光通信系统。仿真分析了300 km、2.5 Gb/s无线激光链路性能，并通过运动仿真台模拟机动环境测试了系统的跟踪与通信性能，其中粗跟踪误差为533.2 μrad(1σ)，精跟踪误差为3.6 μrad(1σ)，测试数据传输240 s，通信误码率为2.82×10-9。仿真与实验验证了该系统用于远距离空空无线激光通信的可行性。     

TiO2/MXene-Assisted LDI-MS for Urine Metabolic Profiling in Urinary Disease

Cancer remains an intractable medical problem. Rapid diagnosis and identification of cancer are critical to differentiate it from nonmalignant diseases. High-throughput biofluid metabolic analysis has potential for cancer diagnosis. Nevertheless, the present metabolite analysis method does not meet the demand for high-throughput screening of diseases. Herein, a high-throughput, cost-effective, and noninvasive urine metabolic profiling method based on TiO₂/MXene-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (LDI-MS) is presented for the efficient screening of bladder cancer (BC) and nonmalignant urinary disease. Combined with machine learning, TiO₂/MXene-assisted LDI-MS enables high diagnostic accuracy (96.8%) for the classification of patient groups (including 47 BC and 46 ureteral calculus (UC) patients) from healthy controls (113 cases). In addition, BC patients can also be identified from noncancerous UC individuals with an accuracy of 88.3% in the independent test cohort. Furthermore, metabolite variations between BC and UC individuals are investigated based on relative quantification, and related pathways are also discussed. These results suggest that this method, based on urine metabolic patterns, provides a potential tool for rapidly distinguishing urinary diseases and it may pave the way for precision medicine.     

A globally convergent BFGS method for pseudo-monotone variational inequality problems

In this paper, we propose a globally convergent BFGS method to solve Variational Inequality Problems (VIPs). In fact, a globalization technique on the basis of the hyperplane projection method is applied to the BFGS method. The technique, which is independent of any merit function, is applicable for pseudo-monotone problems. The proposed method applies the BFGS direction and tries to reduce the distance of iterates to the solution set. This property, called Fejer monotonicity of iterates with respect to the solution set, is the basis of the convergence analysis. The method applied to pseudo-monotone VIP is globally convergent in the sense that subproblems always have unique solutions, and the sequence of iterates converges to a solution to the problem without any regularity assumption. Finally, some numerical simulations are included to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.     

Improved Corrosion Resistance of Selective Laser Melted Ti–5Cu Alloy Using Atomized Ti–5Cu Powder

The different types of metal powder used for selective laser melting(SLM) process would cause distinct corrosion behavior due to the uniformity of the obtained microstructure.The SLM-produced Ti–5Cu alloy using atomized Ti–5Cu metal powder(SLMed Ti–5Cu) in this work reveals a relatively uniform microstructure with overwhelming acicular α/α′ phase and shows great advantages on corrosion resistance compared with the SLM-produced Ti–5Cu alloy using the mixture powder(SLMedM Ti–5Cu).The effect of the micro-galvanic cells decreases due to the undetectable Ti_2Cu phase in the microstructure of the SLMed Ti–5Cu.An apparent passivation behavior was observed for SLMed Ti–5Cu instead of severe pitting phenomenon for the SLMed-M Ti–5Cu.The charge transfer resistance of SLMed Ti–5Cu in this work is 10.09 ± 2.63 MΩ cm~2, which is significantly higher than that of SLMed-M Ti–5Cu(4.76 MΩ cm~2).The above result indicates the atomized Ti–5Cu powder plays an important role in the formation of the uniform microstructure of SLMed product, thereby enhancing its corrosion resistance in Hank's solution at 37 ℃.