M2 macrophage-targeted iron oxide nanoparticles for magnetic resonance image-guided magnetic hyperthermia therapy

Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) play an important role in tumor development and progression.In particular,M2 TAMs can promote tumor growth by facilitating tumor progression and malignant behav-iors.Selectively targeted elimination of M2 TAMs to inhibit tumor progression is of great significance for cancer treatment.Iron oxide nanoparticles based magnetic hyperthermia therapy (MHT) is a classical approach to destroy tumor tissue with deep penetration depth.In this study,we developed a typical M2 macrophage-targeted peptide (M2pep) functionalized superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle(SPIO) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided MHT in an orthotopic breast cancer mouse model,The obtained multifunctional SPIO-M2pep with a hydrodynamic diameter of 20 nm showed efficient targeting capability,high transverse relaxivity (149 mM-1 s-1) and satisfactory magnetic hyperthermia performance in vitro.In vivo studies demonstrated that the SPIO-M2pep based MRI can monitor the distri-bution of nanoparticles in tumor and indicate the suitable timing for MHT.The M2 macrophage-targeted MHT significantly reduced the tumor volume and the population of pro-tumoral M2 TAMs in tumor.In addition,the SPIO-M2pep based MHT can remodel the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME).The multifunctional SPIO-M2pep with M2 macrophage-targeting ability,high magnetic hyperthermia effi-ciency,MR imaging capability and effective role in remodeling the TIME hold great potential to improve clinical cancer therapy outcomes.     

Green synthesised zinc oxide nanostructures through Periploca aphylla extract shows tremendous antibacterial potential against multidrug resistant pathogens

To grapple with multidrug resistant bacterial infections, implementations of antibacterial nanomedicines have gained prime attention of the researchers across the globe. Nowadays, zinc oxide (ZnO) at nano‐scale has emerged as a promising antibacterial therapeutic agent. Keeping this in view, ZnO nanostructures (ZnO‐NS) have been synthesised through reduction by P. aphylla aqueous extract without the utilisation of any acid or base. Structural examinations via scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X‐ray diffraction have revealed pure phase morphology with highly homogenised average particle size of 18 nm. SEM findings were further supplemented by transmission electron microscopy examinations. The characteristic Zn–O peak has been observed around 363 nm using ultra‐violet–visible spectroscopy. Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopy examination has also confirmed the formation of ZnO‐NS through detection of Zn–O bond vibration frequencies. To check the superior antibacterial activity of ZnO‐NS, the authors'' team has performed disc diffusion assay and colony forming unit testing against multidrug resistant E. coli, S. marcescens and E. cloacae. Furthermore, protein kinase inhibition assay and cytotoxicity examinations have revealed that green fabricated ZnO‐NS are non‐hazardous, economical, environmental friendly and possess tremendous potential to treat lethal infections caused by multidrug resistant pathogens.Inspec keywords: nanomedicine, zinc compounds, II‐VI semiconductors, wide band gap semiconductors, nanoparticles, scanning electron microscopy, X‐ray diffraction, antibacterial activity, transmission electron microscopy, particle size, Fourier transform infrared spectra, ultraviolet spectra, visible spectra, enzymes, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, microorganisms, drugs, toxicology, bonds (chemical), semiconductor growth, nanofabrication, vibrational modesOther keywords: green synthesised zinc oxide nanostructures, Periploca aphylla extract, antibacterial potential, multidrug resistant pathogens, multidrug resistant bacterial infections, antibacterial nanomedicines, P. aphylla aqueous extract, structural examinations, scanning electron microscopy, X‐ray diffraction, pure phase morphology, homogenised average particle size, SEM, transmission electron microscopy, Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopy, bond vibration frequency, antibacterial activity, disc diffusion assay, colony forming unit testing, S. marcescens, E. cloacae, E. coli, ultraviolet‐visible spectroscopy, protein kinase inhibition assay, cytotoxicity, lethal infections, ZnO     

Eco‐friendly synthesis of silver nanoparticles and its larvicidal property against fourth instar larvae of Aedes aegypti

In this study, larvicidal activity of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) synthesised using apple extract against fourth instar larvae of Aedes aegypti was determined. As a result, the AgNPs showed moderate larvicidal effects against Ae. aegypti larvae (LC₅₀  = 15.76 ppm and LC₉₀  = 27.7 ppm). In addition, comparison of larvicidal activity performance of AgNPs at high concentration prepared using two different methods showed that Ae. aegypti larvae was fully eliminated within the duration of 2.5 h. From X‐ray diffraction, the AgNP crystallites were found to exhibit face centred cubic structure. The average size of these AgNPs as estimated by particle size distribution was in the range of 50–120 nm. The absorption maxima of the synthesised Ag showed characteristic Ag surface plasmon resonance peak. This green synthesis provides an economic, eco‐friendly and clean synthesis route to Ag.Inspec keywords: silver, nanofabrication, X‐ray diffraction, zoology, particle size, nanoparticles, biomedical materials, nanomedicineOther keywords: time 2.5 h, size 50 nm to 120 nm, silver nanoparticle, larvicidal property, instar larvae, Aedes aegypti, larvicidal effect, larvicidal activity performance, X‐ray diffraction, nanoparticle particle size distribution, absorption maxima, silver surface plasmon resonance peak     

Fabrication of Mn–ZnO photoanodes for photoelectrochemical water splitting applications

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - A photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting ability of pure ZnO and manganese-incorporated ZnO thin films fabricated via a simple...     

Enhancement in Physical Properties of Silver-Doped Fe–Ni Invar Nano-alloy Using Chemical Reduction Method

Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism - Silver-substituted Fe–Ni nano invar alloy is a new and innovative field of research due to their interesting invar, magnetic and electrical...     

Design of a Compact Monopole Antenna for UWB Applications

In this paper, a low cost, highly efficient and low profile monopole antenna for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications is presented. A new inverted triangular-shape structure possessing meander lines is designed to achieve a wideband response and high efficiency. To design the proposed structure, three steps are utilized to achieve an UWB response. The bandwidth of the proposed antenna is improved with changing meander lines parameters, miniaturization of the ground width and optimization of the feeding line. The measured and simulated frequency band ranges from 3.2 to 12 GHz, while the radiation patterns are measured at 4, 5.3, 6 and 8 GHz frequency bands. The overall volume of the proposed antenna is 26 × 25 × 1.6 mm3 ; whereas the FR4 material is used as a substrate with a relative permittivity and loss tangent of 4.3 and 0.025, correspondingly. The peak gain of 4 dB is achieved with a radiation efficiency of 80 to 98% for the entire wideband. Design modelling of proposed antenna is performed in ANSYS HFSS 13 software. A decent consistency between the simulated and measured results is accomplished which shows that the proposed antenna is a potential candidate for the UWB applications.     

Marker-Based and Marker-Less Motion Capturing Video Data: Person and Activity Identification Comparison Based on Machine Learning Approaches

Biomechanics is the study of physiological properties of data and the measurement of human behavior. In normal conditions, behavioural properties in stable form are created using various inputs of subconscious/conscious human activities such as speech style, body movements in walking patterns, writing style and voice tunes. One cannot perform any change in these inputs that make results reliable and increase the accuracy. The aim of our study is to perform a comparative analysis between the marker-based motion capturing system (MBMCS) and the marker-less motion capturing system (MLMCS) using the lower body joint angles of human gait patterns. In both the MLMCS and MBMCS, we collected trajectories of all the participants and performed joint angle computation to identify a person and recognize an activity (walk and running). Using five state of the art machine learning algorithms, we obtained 44.6% and 64.3% accuracy in person identification using MBMCS and MLMCS respectively with an ensemble algorithm (two angles as features). In the second set of experiments, we used six machine learning algorithms to obtain 65.9% accuracy with the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm (two angles as features) and 74.6% accuracy with an ensemble algorithm. Also, by increasing features (6 angles), we obtained higher accuracy of 99.3% in MBMCS for person recognition and 98.1% accuracy in MBMCS for activity recognition using the KNN algorithm. MBMCS is computationally expensive and if we re-design the model of OpenPose with more body joint points and employ more features, MLMCS (low-cost system) can be an effective approach for video data analysis in a person identification and activity recognition process.     

An Efficient False-Positive Reduction System for Cerebral Microbleeds Detection

Cerebral Microbleeds (CMBs) are microhemorrhages caused by certain abnormalities of brain vessels. CMBs can be found in people with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease, and in old individuals having a brain injury. Current research reveals that CMBs can be highly dangerous for individuals having dementia and stroke. The CMBs seriously impact individuals’ life which makes it crucial to recognize the CMBs in its initial phase to stop deterioration and to assist individuals to have a normal life. The existing work report good results but often ignores false-positive’s perspective for this research area. In this paper, an efficient approach is presented to detect CMBs from the Susceptibility Weighted Images (SWI). The proposed framework consists of four main phases (i) making clusters of brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using k-mean classifier (ii) reduce false positives for better classification results (iii) discriminative feature extraction specific to CMBs (iv) classification using a five layers convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method is evaluated on a public dataset available for 20 subjects. The proposed system shows an accuracy of 98.9% and a 1.1% false-positive rate value. The results show the superiority of the proposed work as compared to existing states of the art methods.     

Osteoporosis Prediction for Trabecular Bone using Machine Learning: A Review

Trabecular bone holds the utmost importance due to its significance regarding early bone loss. Diseases like osteoporosis greatly affect the structure of the Trabecular bone which results in different outcomes like high risk of fracture. The objective of this paper is to inspect the characteristics of the Trabecular Bone by using the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique. These characteristics prove to be quite helpful in studying different studies related to Trabecular bone such as osteoporosis. The things that were considered before the selection of the articles for the systematic review were language, research field, and electronic sources. Only those articles written in the English language were selected as it is the most prominent language used in scientific, engineering, computer science, and biomedical researches. This literature review was conducted on the articles published between 2006 and 2020. A total of 62 research papers out of 1050 papers were extracted which were according to our topic of review after screening abstract and article content for the title and abstract screening. The findings from those researches were compiled at the end of the result section. This systematic literature review presents a comprehensive report on scientific researches and studies that have been done in the medical area concerning trabecular bone.     

Suitability of VVC and HEVC for Video Telehealth Systems

Video compression in medical video streaming is one of the key technologies associated with mobile healthcare. Seamless delivery of medical video streams over a resource constrained network emphasizes the need of a video codec that requires minimum bitrates and maintains high perceptual quality. This paper presents a comparative study between High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and its potential successor Versatile Video Coding (VVC) in the context of healthcare. A large-scale subjective experiment comprising of twenty-four non-expert participants is presented for eight different test conditions in Full High Definition (FHD) videos. The presented analysis highlights the impact of compression artefacts on the perceptual quality of HEVC and VVC processed videos. Our results and findings show that VVC clearly outperforms HEVC in terms of achieving higher compression, while maintaining high quality in FHD videos. VVC requires upto 40% less bitrate for encoding an FHD video at excellent perceptual quality. We have provided rate-quality curves for both encoders and a degree of overlap across both codecs in terms of perceptual quality. Overall, there is a 71% degree of overlap in terms of quality between VVC and HEVC compressed videos for eight different test conditions.