Role of mitochondria in the switch mechanism of the cell death mode from apoptosis to necrosis--studies on rho0 cells

Detailed mechanisms of the switch of the cell death mode from apoptosis to necrosis remain to be solved, although the intracellular level of ATP and that of free radicals have been postulated to be the major factors involved in the mechanisms. In the present study menadione (MEN)-induced cell injury processes were studied using rho0 cells derived from human osteosarcoma 143B cells and parental rho+ cells co-treated with inhibitors of electron transfer chain of mitochondria or oligomycin, an inhibitor of ATP synthesis. Treatment of rho+ cells with 100 microM MEN induced apoptosis, which reached the maximum at 6 h, and was followed by an abrupt decrease thereafter, while necrotic cells (NC) increased continuously when they were judged by Annexin V and PI double staining. On the other hand, MEN induced apoptotic and necrotic changes much faster in rho0 cells compared to rho+ cells. The frequency to find apoptotic cells (AP) in the former cells was distinctly smaller than that to find NC judged by Annexin V and PI double staining. Electron microscopically, a major population of rho0 cells treated with MEN for 6 h consisted of intermediate cells, and a small number of AP co-existed. At 9 h of the treatment intermediate cells were exclusively seen, and AP were hardly detected. When parental rho+ cells were treated with MEN in the presence of oligomycin or oligomycin plus antimycin A both apoptotic and necrotic changes of the cells were distinctly accelerated. The intracellular level of superoxide in rho0 cells continuously increased after the MEN treatment, whereas that of ATP remained distinctly low before and after the MEN treatment compared to that in rho+ cells. These data suggest that the intracellular level of superoxide may be a key factor controlling the switch from apoptosis to necrosis.     

Functional imaging in small animals using X-ray computed tomography--study of physiologic measurement reproducibility

X-ray computed tomography (CT) has been traditionally used for morphologic analysis and in the recent past has been used for physiology imaging. This paper seeks to demonstrate functional CT as an effective tool for monitoring changes in tissue physiology associated with disease processes and cellular and molecular level therapeutic processes. We investigated the effect of noise and sampling time on the uncertainty of tissue physiologic parameters. A whole body compartmental model of mouse was formulated to simulate tissue time density curves and study the deviation of tissue physiologic parameters from their true values. These results were then used to determine the appropriate scanning protocols for the experimental studies. Dynamic contrast enhanced CT (DCE-CT) was performed in mice following the injection of hydrophilic iodinated contrast agent (CA) at three different injection rates, namely 0.5 ml/min, 1 ml/min, and 2.0 ml/min. These experiments probed the Nyquist sampling limit for reproducibility of tissue physiologic parameters. Separate experiments were performed with three mice at four different X-ray tube currents corresponding to different image noise values. A two-compartment model (2CM) model was formulated to describe the contrast kinematics in the kidney cortex. Three different 2CMs were implemented namely the 4-parameter (4P), 5-parameter (5P), and the 6-parameter (6P) model. The tissue kinematics is fitted to the models by using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm implemented in IDL (RSI Inc.) programming language to minimize the weighted sum of squares. The relevant tissue physiologic parameters extracted from the models are the renal blood flow (RBF), glomerular filtration rate (GFR), fractional plasma volume, fractional tubular volumes and urine formation rates. The experimental results indicate that the deviation of the tissue physiologic parameters is within the limits required for tracking disease physiology in vivo and thus small animal functional X-ray CT would be able to determine changes in tissue physiology in vivo.     

Time-varying analysis methods and models for the respiratory and cardiac system coupling in graded exercise

The analysis of heart period series is a difficult task especially under graded exercise conditions. From all the information present in these series, we are the most interested in the coupling between respiratory and cardiac systems, known as respiratory sinus arrythmia. In this paper, we show that precise patterns concerning the respiratory frequency can be extracted from the heart period series. An evolutive model is introduced in order to achieve tracking of the main respiratory-related frequencies and their time-varying amplitudes. Since respiration acts to modulate the sinus rhythm, we relate the frequencies and amplitudes to this modulation by analyzing in detail its nonlinear transformation giving the heart period signal. This analysis is performed assuming stationary conditions but also in the realistic case where the mean heart period, the amplitude, and the frequency of the respiration are time-varying. Since this paper is devoted to the theoretical and complete presentation of the method used in a physiological study published elsewhere, the capabilities of our method will be illustrated in a realistic simulated case.     

带门极双层Si-δ-掺杂GaAs中的奇特非线性耗尽

报道了带门极双层 Si-δ-掺杂 Ga As样品中的二维电子系统 Hall效应的低温测量实验 ,观察到了电子耗尽过程中电子浓度与门电压的奇特、复杂的非线性关系 .根据双电容器 (由两个δ-掺杂二维电子层和一个金属门电极构成 )模型的假设和在双对数坐标中电子迁移率与电子浓度呈线性关系的实验结果 ,解释了这一非线性耗尽现象 .     

红外搜索与跟踪系统的硬件实现问题（下）

4不均匀性补偿 红外焦平面列阵传感器是用一维探测器列阵或者二维探测器列阵制成的,每个探测器覆盖传感器视场中的一个景像像元.这些红外焦平面列阵灵敏度高,光学结构简单,机械结构紧凑,但却存在着不均匀性[3-5].现有两种方法可执行不均匀性补偿.     

双波长全息存储中的扇形噪音抑制

分析了普通配置下双波长存储中,不同波长偏离对扇形噪音读出的影响,并从实验上研究了掺铁铌酸锂晶体的最佳读出配置,为能使民存图像完整再现,使用了一个柱面镜来调整读出光的波前,在双掺铌酸锂晶体中实现了整幅图像高信噪比再现,达到了预期效果。     

Elastic registration of fMRI data using Bézier-spline transformations

A three-dimensional (3-D) elastic registration algorithm has been developed to find a veridical transformation that maps activation patterns from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments onto a 3-D high-resolution anatomical dataset. The proposed algorithm uses trilinear Bézier-splines and a 3-D voxel-based optimization technique to determine the transformation that maps the functional data onto the coordinate system of the anatomical dataset. Simple conditions are presented which guarantee that the data are mapped one-to-one on each other. Two voxel-based similarity measures, the linear correlation coefficient and the entropy correlation coefficient, are used. Their performance with respect to the registration of fMRI data is compared. Tests on simulated and real data have been performed to evaluate the accuracy of the method. Our results demonstrate that subvoxel accuracy can be achieved even for noisy low-resolution multislice datasets with local distortions up to 10 mm. Although the method is optimized for the registration of functional and anatomical MR images, it can also be used for solving other elastic registration problems.     

Automated detection of pulmonary nodules in helical CT images based on an improved template-matching technique

The purpose of this study is to develop a technique for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to detect lung nodules in helical X-ray pulmonary computed tomography CT) images. We propose a novel template-matching technique based on a genetic algorithm (GA) template matching (GATM) for detecting nodules existing within the lung area; the GA was used to determine the target position in the observed image efficiently and to select an adequate template image from several reference patterns for quick template matching. In addition, a conventional template matching was employed to detect nodules existing on the lung wall area, lung wall template matching (LWTM), where semicircular models were used as reference patterns; the semicircular models were rotated according to the angle of the target point on the contour of the lung wall. After initial detecting candidates using the two template-matching methods, we extracted a total of 13 feature values and used them to eliminate false-positive findings. Twenty clinical cases involving a total of 557 sectional images were used in this study. 71 nodules out of 98 were correctly detected by our scheme (i.e., a detection rate of about 72%), with the number of false positives at approximately 1.1/sectional image. Our present results show that our scheme can be regarded as a technique for CAD systems to detect nodules in helical CT pulmonary images.     

带门极双层Si-δ-掺杂GaAs中的奇特非线性耗尽

报道了带门极双层Si-δ-掺杂GaAs样品中的二维电子系统Hall效应的低温测量实验,观察到了电子耗尽过程中电子浓度与门电压的奇特、复杂的非线性关系.根据双电容器(由两个δ-掺杂二维电子层和一个金属门电极构成)模型的假设和在双对数坐标中电子迁移率与电子浓度呈线性关系的实验结果,解释了这一非线性耗尽现象.     

Influence of pH of spray solution on optoelectronic properties of cadmium oxide thin films

Highly conducting transparent cadmium oxide thin films were prepared by the conventional spray pyrolysis technique. The pH of the spray solution is varied by adding ammonia/hydrochloric acid. The effect of pH on the morphology, crystallinity and optoelectronic properties of these films is studied. The structural analysis showed all the films in the cubic phase. For the films with pH < 7(acidic condition), the preferred orientation is along the(111) direction and for those with pH >7(alkaline condition), the preferred orientation is along the(200) direction.A lowest resistivity of 9.9104 cm(with carrier concentration D5.11020cm3, mobility D12.4 cm2/(V s))is observed for pH12. The resistivity is tuned almost by three orders of magnitude by controlling the bath pH with optical transmittance more than 70%. Thus, the electrical conductivity of CdO films could be easily tuned by simply varying the pH of the spray solution without compromising the optical transparency.