Creativity in Japanese Society

‘The Japanese are not creative, they just copy….’ This prejudice often crops up when you ask Western people about the creativity of the Japanese. However, Japanese industry is at the leading edge in many industrial sectors and one cannot adhere to this prejudice any longer. Japanese creativity is interesting from two points of view. First, Japanese industry is very competitive and the success cannot be explained by a single factor, like low wages or production costs. Secondly, there is a big difference between Japanese and western civilization and a comparison shows cultural influences on creativity in understanding and practice. However, the cultural specialities which are labelled as Japanese are mostly characteristic of other East Asian cultures as well.     

Quantitative measurement of gas hold-up distribution in a stirred chemical reactor using X-ray cone-beam computed tomography

Cone-beam type X-ray computed tomography (CBCT) is a potential method to measure three-dimensional phase distributions in vessels. An example for that is the measurement of gas profiles in stirred chemical reactors. Such data are highly valuable for the assessment and evaluation of chemical processes, for optimisation of the reactor and stirrer design, and for evaluation of computational fluid dynamics codes used to model the fluid flow and heat transfer in reactive systems. However, there are considerable difficulties for accurate quantitative measurements due to beam hardening and radiation scattering effects. In a theoretical and experimental work we have investigated the non-linear effects of both physical phenomena and developed a suitable measurement setup as well as calibration and software correction methods to achieve a highly accurate measurement of void fraction profiles with CBCT.     

Cobalt Ferrite Magnetic Nanoparticles for Tracing Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Tissue: A Preliminary Study

Therapy with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is promising in many diseases. Evaluation of their efficacy depends on adequate follow-up of MSCs after transplantation. Several studies have shown that MSCs can be labeled and subsequently visualized with magnetic nanoparticles (NPs). We investigated the homing of MSCs labeled with magnetic cobalt ferrite NPs in experimentally induced acute kidney injury in mice. To explore the homing of MSCs after systemic infusion into mice, we developed a pre-infusion strategy for optimal tracing and identification of MSCs with polyacrylic acid-coated cobalt ferrite (CoFe₂O₄) NPs by light and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) in various organs of mice with cisplatin-induced acute kidney injury and control mice. By correlative microscopy, we detected MSCs labeled with NPs in the lungs, spleen, kidney, and intestine of cisplatin-treated mice and in the lungs and spleen of control mice. Our results confirm that labeling MSCs with metal NPs did not affect the ultrastructure of MSCs and their ability to settle in various organs. This study demonstrates the usefulness of cobalt ferrite NPs in ex vivo visualization of MSCs and offers correlative microscopy as a useful method in routine histopathology laboratories for tracing MSCs in paraffin-embedded tissue.     

The Role of the Choroid in Stargardt Disease

Stargardt disease is the commonest juvenile macular dystrophy. It is caused by genetic mutations in the ABCA4 gene. Diagnosis is not always straightforward, and various phenocopies exist. Late-onset disease can be misdiagnosed with age-related macular disease. A correct diagnosis is particularly critical because of emergent gene therapies. Stargardt disease is known to affect retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptors. Many studies have also highlighted the importance of the choroid in the diagnosis, pathophysiology, and progression of the disease. The choroid is in an integral relationship with the retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptors, and its possible involvement during the disease should be considered. The purpose of this review is to analyze the current diagnostic tools for choroidal evaluation and the extrapolation of useful data for ophthalmologists and researchers studying the disease.     

Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine in Pediatric Urology: Urethral and Urinary Bladder Reconstruction

In the case of pediatric urology there are several congenital conditions, such as hypospadias and neurogenic bladder, which affect, respectively, the urethra and the urinary bladder. In fact, the gold standard consists of a urethroplasty procedure in the case of urethral malformations and enterocystoplasty in the case of urinary bladder disorders. However, both surgical procedures are associated with severe complications, such as fistulas, urethral strictures, and dehiscence of the repair or recurrence of chordee in the case of urethroplasty, and metabolic disturbances, stone formation, urine leakage, and chronic infections in the case of enterocystoplasty. With the aim of overcoming the issue related to the lack of sufficient and appropriate autologous tissue, increasing attention has been focused on tissue engineering. In this review, both the urethral and the urinary bladder reconstruction strategies were summarized, focusing on pediatric applications and evaluating all the biomaterials tested in both animal models and patients. Particular attention was paid to the capability for tissue regeneration in dependence on the eventual presence of seeded cell and growth factor combinations in several types of scaffolds. Moreover, the main critical features needed for urinary tissue engineering have been highlighted and specifically focused on for pediatric application.     

Primary Aldosteronism and Resistant Hypertension: A Pathophysiological Insight

Primary aldosteronism (PA) is a pathological condition characterized by an excessive aldosterone secretion; once thought to be rare, PA is now recognized as the most common cause of secondary hypertension. Its prevalence increases with the severity of hypertension, reaching up to 29.1% in patients with resistant hypertension (RH). Both PA and RH are “high-risk phenotypes”, associated with increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality compared to non-PA and non-RH patients. Aldosterone excess, as occurs in PA, can contribute to the development of a RH phenotype through several mechanisms. First, inappropriate aldosterone levels with respect to the hydro-electrolytic status of the individual can cause salt retention and volume expansion by inducing sodium and water reabsorption in the kidney. Moreover, a growing body of evidence has highlighted the detrimental consequences of “non-classical” effects of aldosterone in several target tissues. Aldosterone-induced vascular remodeling, sympathetic overactivity, insulin resistance, and adipose tissue dysfunction can further contribute to the worsening of arterial hypertension and to the development of drug-resistance. In addition, the pro-oxidative, pro-fibrotic, and pro-inflammatory effects of aldosterone may aggravate end-organ damage, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle that eventually leads to a more severe hypertensive phenotype. Finally, neither the pathophysiological mechanisms mediating aldosterone-driven blood pressure rise, nor those mediating aldosterone-driven end-organ damage, are specifically blocked by standard first-line anti-hypertensive drugs, which might further account for the drug-resistant phenotype that frequently characterizes PA patients.     

Bioinspired pressure actuated adhesive system

We developed a dry synthetic adhesive system inspired by gecko feet adhesion that can switch reversibly from adhesion to non-adhesion with applied pressure as external stimulus. Micropatterned polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surfaces with pillars of 30 μm length and 10 μm diameter were fabricated using photolithography and moulding. Adhesion properties were determined with a flat probe as a function of preload. For low and moderate applied compressive preloads, measured adhesion was 7.5 times greater than on flat controls whereas for high applied preloads adhesion dropped to very low values. In situ imaging shows that the increased preload caused the pillars to deform by bending and/or buckling and to lose their adhesive contact. The elasticity of PDMS aids the pillar recovery to the upright position upon removal of preload enabling repeatability of the switch.     

Fabrication of a Macroporous Microwell Array for Surface‐Enhanced Raman Scattering

Here, a colloidal templating procedure for generating high‐density arrays of gold macroporous microwells, which act as discrete sites for surface‐enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), is reported. Development of such a novel array with discrete macroporous sites requires multiple fabrication steps. First, selective wet‐chemical etching of the distal face of a coherent optical fiber bundle produces a microwell array. The microwells are then selectively filled with a macroporous structure by electroless template synthesis using self‐assembled nanospheres. The fabricated arrays are structured at both the micrometer and nanometer scale on etched imaging bundles. Confocal Raman microscopy is used to detect a benzenethiol monolayer adsorbed on the macroporous gold and to map the spatial distribution of the SERS signal. The Raman enhancement factor of the modified wells is investigated and an average enhancement factor of 4 × 10⁴ is measured. This demonstrates that such nanostructured wells can enhance the local electromagnetic field and lead to a platform of ordered SERS‐active micrometer‐sized spots defined by the initial shape of the etched optical fibers. Since the fabrication steps keep the initial architecture of the optical fiber bundle, such ordered SERS‐active platforms fabricated onto an imaging waveguide open new applications in remote SERS imaging, plasmonic devices, and integrated electro‐optical sensor arrays.     

Novel JPEG 2000 Compliant DWT and IWT VLSI Implementations

This paper proposes two JPEG 2000 compliant architectures: one for DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) and one for IWT (Integer Wavelet Transform) implementation. First of all some theoretical issues about DWT and IWT are discussed, then, starting from transforms characteristics, the architectures are presented showing both performance and cost. In the literature many DWT architectures have been proposed; our implementation is a new architecture that computes the DWT using filters of interest for the forthcoming JPEG 2000 standard. Moreover, we propose a Lifting Scheme based architecture for IWT, JPEG 2000 compliant too. The proposed architectures are able to support real-time streams: the DWT one, which is made of 20,000 cells, with an input throughput of 160 Msamples per second and a clock frequency of 160 MHz, the IWT one, consisting of 50,000 cells, with an input throughput of 4.5 Msamples per second and an internal clock frequency of 108 MHz.