Automatic Instrument Research Articles

Marketing in the Era of Data Change

If we do not carry out the construction of modern system and without the help of informatization, it will not only waste time, but also be prone to errors. Using information technology, we can achieve three scientific and modern requirements. One is scientific process. Through information technology, all links of sorting, sorting, and receiving, distribution and transportation packaging are implemented in place, and automatic scanning instrument is used to ensure that the products are free from pollution, odor and wrong taking, and the one-stop process service is realized. The second is scientific operation, through information technology to integrate the collaborative supply chain, constantly analyze and improve their own problems, learn from each other to realize integrated supply, real-time information sharing, and promote all aspects of logistics into a higher level. Similarly, in this process, enterprises are no longer simply playing the role of logistics, but also should be introduced into modern science and technology industry, establish research bases within logistics, introduce information facilities, and contribute to the promotion of corporate culture.

Clinical aspects of umbilical cord cannulation during transfer from the uterus to a liquid-based perinatal life support system for extremely premature infants a qualitative generic study.

A liquid-based perinatal life support system (PLS) for extremely premature infants (born before 28 week of gestational age) envisions a connection between the infant's native umbilical cord and an artificial placenta system through cannulation. This system mimics a natural mothers' womb to achieve better organ maturations. The objective of this study is to gain insight into the clinical focus points of umbilical cord cannulation and how cannulation should be addressed in extremely premature infants during the transfer from the uterus to an in-utero simulating liquid-based PLS system. We performed an explorative qualitative study. Twelve medical specialists with knowledge of vessel cannulation participated. We collected data through twelve interviews and two focus group discussions. Data were analyzed using inductive content and constant comparison analysis via open and axial coding. Results were derived on the following topics: (1) cannulation technique, (2) cannula fixation, (3) local and systemic anticoagulation, and (4) vasospasm. A side-entry technique is preferred as this may decrease wall damage, stabilizes the vessel better and ensures continuous blood flow. Sutures, especially via an automatic microsurgery instrument, are favored above glue, stents, or balloons as these may be firmer and faster. Medication possibilities for both vasospasm and anticoagulation should function locally since there were uncertainties regarding the systemic effects. According to the findings of this research, the needed umbilical cord cannulation method should include minimal wall damage, improved vascular stability, blood flow maintenance, a strong fixation connection, and local anticoagulation effect.

Post-evaluation of frost resistance of cement concrete entities based on pore spacing factors of hardened concrete

In this paper, the effects of water-cement ratio, air-entraining agent type, and air content on the pore characteristic parameters of hardened concrete were investigated through an extensive series of experimental studies. First of all, according to different water-cement ratios, air-entraining agent types, and air contents, the correlation between the concrete pore spacing factor and the frost resistance durability factor was revealed by using the automatic analysis and testing instrument for the pore system of hardened concrete. Then, the decision tree method was utilized to propose specific pore spacing factors for different concrete scenarios, including the non-air-entrained concrete, air-entrained concrete, concrete with unqualified frost resistance, and concrete with qualified frost resistance. In cases where the pore spacing factor measurement fell within an ambiguous range, the classification was further refined according to the water-cement ratio. On that basis, the comprehensive range of pore spacing factors for the concrete with a qualified frost resistance was determined. Finally, the post-evaluation method and standard procedure for assessing the frost resistance of concrete entities based on pore spacing factor and water-cement ratio were proposed to verify whether the frost resistance of concrete buildings meets the life expectancy requirements. This method facilitates the evaluation of the frost resistance quality of newly-built concrete projects, as well as the investigation and monitoring of frost resistance in existing structures during service.

Combined a Pressure Sensor and Internet of Things in a Low-Cost Tide Gauge

Tides are important in many fields, such as port planning, nautical charting, and bathymetry surveys. However, the distribution of tide observation stations in Indonesia is still uneven, so simple tidal data collection still uses tide palms to observe the movement of sea levels. The manual tidal observation method has limitations because visually the ability of the observer to see the tide reading is different, so it is subjective. Therefore, the solution to this problem is a tidal instrument that is easy to make, provides real-time data, and produces accurate information, saving energy and time. However, using automatic tide gauge instruments is still not affordable in the Indonesian market. This study creates a low-cost pressure tide gauge by integrating a pressure sensor with an Arduino microcontroller. In addition, the data monitoring process uses the Internet of Things system. Data from the instrument measurements were uploaded to the Thingspeak website live, allowing observers to monitor in real time. Instrument’s data with noise and anomalies will go through a data filtering process with the moving average and moving median methods. Testing the instrument’s error rate compares the data generated by the instrument with tidal data from the Indonesian Geospatial Agency (BIG). Both tidal data went through calculating Root Mean Square Error, or RMSE. Based on the instrument error test results, the RMSE value for moving average data against BIG is 27.963 cm and moving median data against BIG is 27.787 cm.

Comparison of Sunshine Duration Measurements between the Campbell–Stokes Sunshine Recorder and Three Automatic Sensors at Three Locations in Cyprus

This paper compares the daily sunshine duration (SD) measured by the Campbell–Stokes sunshine recorder (CS) with three automatic instruments (Kipp & Zonen pyranometers (CM6 B), pyrheliometer (CHP1) and CSD3 sunshine recorders). The comparisons are essential, since recently, automatic sunshine duration sensors have been replacing the manual measurements, affecting, therefore, the continuity of the CS time series. The comparisons were applied to the daily SD data of three synoptic stations (Larnaca A/P, Pafos A/P and Athalassa) where parallel measurements of manual and automatic instruments are carried out during the periods 2009–2012 and 2012–2015. The CSD3 measurements were obtained from two automatic weather stations (AWSs) which are close to the synoptic station of Larnaca A/P. The comparisons referred to the daily and monthly sums of sunshine duration, as well as to their statistical distributions and their relationships. The daily differences in the pairs of sunshine recorders installed at the same location are mostly within the range of −1.0 to +1.0 h. At Larnaca, in the period 2009–2012, the pyranometric method’s (Gl) values were higher than the CS in the summer months. Pafos and Athalassa showed higher values of CS compared to Gl and the pyrheliometric method (Pr), respectively, almost throughout the year. Generally, the annual average daily differences between the different pairs range between 0.3 and 0.5 h. Regression equations were determined allowing the estimation of daily SD under different sky conditions. The coefficient of determination (R2) reached the values of 0.91 and 0.96 under ‘all sky’ conditions, and between 0.80 and 0.91 under ‘clear’ sky conditions at the three locations.

A magnetic solid phase chemiluminescent immunoassay for quantification of Cystatin C in human serum

A chemiluminescent immunoassay for human serum Cystatin C (Cys C) was established using a direct-antibody sandwich model. The immunoassay kit uses magnetic separation technology, using magnetic particles as the reaction solid phase, alkaline phosphatase as the marker enzyme, and a new chemiluminescent substrate APLS as the substrate. It has the characteristics of high sensitivity and short reaction time. This product uses high-affinity antibodies, resulting in a high specificity. The established method showed good accuracy, uniformity, and stability. The limit of detection was 2.39 ng/mL. The intra-assay coefficient of variation (CV) was 3.36%–6.00%, the interassay CV was 4.12%–5.35%, and the recovery rate was 99.07%. The correlation coefficient (r) of Cys-C kit was 0.999388 ≥ 0.9900. The accuracy of the developed method was tested by automatic chemiluminescence instrument (P > 0.05). The lowest titer was 0.92500, and the highest was 1.10000. The developed method showed a good correlation with the product from Roche by comparing these two kits in 240 clinical samples from China. In total, 1392 clinical patient from China samples were measured using the reagent kit developed in this study.

Study on Mechanical Properties of Deep Expansive Soil and Coupling Damage Model of Freeze–Thaw Action and Loading

This study is primarily intended to present a damage constitutive equation under the combined action of confining pressures and freeze–thaw cycles by subjecting deep expansive clay to the consolidated undrained triaxial tests. We study the influence of the numbers of freeze–thaw cycles on various mechanical indexes of soil by using the TSZ-2 instrument (fully automatic triaxial instrument). As the number of freeze–thaw cycles increases, the ultimate peak stress of the soil decreases, and then, the effect of the freeze–thaw effect on the shear strength gradually weakened. By combining the expression method of the damage variable under the action of loading alone with the expression method under the action of freeze–thaw cycles alone, we brought in the damage evolution equation to obtain the damage constitutive equation under the combined action of confining pressures and freeze–thaw cycles. The stress values under three confining pressures (100 kPa, 200 kPa, and 300 kPa) can be determined by using the final damage constitutive model. The measured data with a water content of 17% and six freeze–thaw cycles were compared with the theoretical data. The actual strength values were 118.4 kPa, 152.3 kPa, and 184.1 kPa, and the theoretical strength values were 120 kPa, 150 kPa, and 186 kPa. The fitting degree of the strength value was as high as 99%, which verifies the feasibility of this model. This study can serve as an available reference for well wall construction and disaster prediction in deep coal mining.

SAVAnet: Surgical Action-Driven Visual Attention Network for Autonomous Endoscope Control

An endoscope holder must understand the detailed surgical actions and the surgeons’ visual attention to keep important targets in the field of endoscopic view during operations. From an intensive analysis of the surgeons’ attention mechanism, we included that surgical actions, like cutting, suturing, etc., play an important role in determining the positions and weights of visual attention points during a dynamic surgical scene. To perform this process, this work proposes a Surgical Action-driven Visual Attention network (SAVAnet) and applies the network in autonomous endoscope control. Four scenarios are constructed in the da Vinci V-rep simulator: pick&place and needle exercise in a general laparoscopic training environment, needle driving with and without obstacle removal in an abdominal cavity, to create datasets for network training. The results show that the network has an outstanding performance in surgical action prediction with a high average accuracy of over 91%. Additionally, with surgical action guidance, the attention point prediction has higher accuracy and accords with surgeons’ visual attention. Finally, the acquired attention points are utilized to execute visual servoing in simulation. The results verify that the SAVAnet is feasible for autonomous endoscope control in real-time and lays a theoretical foundation for future sim-to-real execution. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —This paper was motivated by the problem of endowing an endoscope with surgeons’ visual attention mechanism, which is affected by surgical actions, for autonomous endoscope control. An eye-tracking device has been utilized to detect surgeon’s visual attention in real-time and then control the endoscope to follow what the surgeon is looking at. However, this approach is susceptible to the surgical environment. Besides, many instrument detection and segmentation algorithms are developed for automatic surgical instrument tracking. However, surgeons’ visual attention does not always focus on the instruments during operations. In this work, we propose a novel SAVAnet to determine visual attention based on surgical actions. We prove from many qualitative and quantitative experiments that surgical actions play a significant role in determining visual attention. The designed SAVAnet can predict surgical actions correctly and then effectively guide the choice of visual attention. Finally, the simulation results show that the SAVAnet can endow endoscope with surgeons’ visual attention to perform self-control in real time. In future research, we will train the SAVAnet using real datasets and conduct more physical experiments on real surgical robots.

Application Analysis of Oil Depot Control Valve

As an independent facility for storing, sending and receiving oil products, oil storage tanks often have the characteristics of major dangerous sources--with the characteristics of high risk and danger. Thus, once it’s out of work, the consequences will be unthinkably serious. Controlling valves are the important equipment of storage tank. Hence, the design and type selection, safety quality and design scheme of vales have an important impact on the normal operation of storage tank. Based on the current situation of the tank control system in the petroleum storage industry, this paper analyzes and discusses the application of the tank control valve system from the aspects of design, construction and later operation, and refers to the wide use of the automatic control instrument system, and puts forward reasonable suggestions.

Development and application of a rapid scheme for detection of respiratory virus nucleic acid

This study aimed to develop a portable, accurate and easy-to-operate scheme for rapid detection of respiratory virus nucleic acid. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) was used to verify the effect of extraction-free respiratory virus treatment reagent (RTU) on viral nucleic acid treatment and the effect of ultra-fast fluorescence quantitative PCR instrument (FQ-8A) on nucleic acid amplification, respectively. RTU and FQ-8A were combined to develop a rapid detection scheme for respiratory virus nucleic acid, and the positive detection rate was judged by Ct value using a fluorescence quantitative PCR instrument, and the accuracy of the scheme in clinical samples detection was investigated. The results showed that RTU had comparable sensitivity to the automatic nucleic acid extraction instrument, its extraction efficiency was comparable to the other 3 extraction methods when extracting samples of different virus types, but the extraction time of RTU was less than 5 min. FQ-8A had good consistency in detection respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and adenovirus (ADV) compared with the control instrument ABI-7500, with kappa coefficients of 0.938 (P < 0.001) and 0.887 (P < 0.001), respectively, but the amplification time was only about 0.5 h. The RTU and FQ-8A combined rapid detection scheme had a highly consistent detection rate with the conventional detection scheme, with a sensitivity of 91.70% and specificity of 100%, and a kappa coefficient was 0.944 (P < 0.001). In conclusion, by combining RTU with FQ-8A, a rapid respiratory virus nucleic acid detection scheme was developed, the whole process could be completed in 35 min. The scheme is accurate and easy-to-operate, and can provide important support for the rapid diagnosis and treatment of respiratory virus.

Scutellarin alleviates liver injury in type 2 diabetic mellitus by suppressing hepatocyte apoptosis in vitro and in vivo

ObjectiveScutellarin is a primary active composition come from Erigeronbreviscapus. It is well known that scutellarin has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant physiological functions. In this study, we detected the effects of scutellarin on hepatocyte cell apoptosis in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) rats. MethodsSprague Dawley (SD) (6–8 weeks, 160–180 g) rats were randomly divided into six groups: control, model, scutellarin low-dose, medium-dose, high-dose treatment, and rosiglitazone positive groups; with 10 SD rats in each group (n = 10). The changes of biochemical factors in serum were detected by automatic biochemical instrument, the pathological changes of liver tissue were detected by hematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining, the apoptosis of liver tissue and cells was detected by tissue staining and flow analyzer, and the expression of apoptosis-related factors were determined by qPCR, Western blot and immunohistochemistry in liver tissues or cells. ResultsThe results showed that scutellarin decreased the levels of fasting blood glucose, total cholesterol, triglyceride, and low-density lipoprotein and increased the levels of high-density lipoprotein. Meanwhile, scutellarin decreased the levels of alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate transaminase (AST) and improved liver function. In addition, scutellarin suppressed the secretion of interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and reduced hepatocyte apoptosis. Furthermore, scutellarin inhibited the expression of cleaved Caspase-3, Bax, and cytochrome C (Cyt-C) and promoted the expression of Bcl-2. ConclusionScutellarin can inhibit the apoptotic pathway, thereby relieving T2DM.

Tests and dynamic simulation analysis of an automatic instrument

To better study the dynamic characteristics of an automatic instrument and establish a realistic simulation model of automatic instruments, this paper has carried out movement tests of crucial parts under fixed conditions and recoil tests and collected the speed-time and recoil-time curves. Based on ADAMS software, the virtual prototype model of the key parts of the instrument is established, and the dynamic simulation is carried out. The different simulation results are separately compared with the experimental data, which verifies the accuracy of the recoil simulation model and provides a reference for the optimal design and improvement of the automatic instrument.

Th1 or Th2 cytokines are correlated with Tregs and T cell subsets and pregnancy outcomes in patients with autoimmune thyroid disease during early, middle, late pregnancy, and postpartum period

Autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) is a T lymphocytes-mediated autoimmune disorder affecting pregnant women. The current study sought to determine the correlations between T helper-1 (Th1)/T helper-2 (Th2) cytokines and regulatory T cells (Tregs) and T cell subsets and pregnancy outcomes in AITD patients during early pregnancy (T1), middle pregnancy (T2), late pregnancy (T3), and postpartum period (PP). A total of 60 patients with Graves’ disease, 60 patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and 30 healthy pregnant women were initially enrolled in the study. Thyroid hormones and antibodies, Th1 or Th2 cytokines, transforming growth factor-β, Tregs, CD4+ T helper cells (CD4+), CD8+ T helper cells (CD8+) levels were determined by means of Maglumi2000 automatic chemiluminescence instrument, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and flow cytometry. Our findings demonstrated higher IFN-γ and IL-2 levels, along with lower IL-4, IL-10, TGF-β, Treg, and CD4+/CD8+ levels in AITD patients during T1, T2, T3, and PP. Furthermore, the TGF-β, Treg, and CD4+/CD8+ levels were lower in the IFN-γ/IL-2 high expression group but higher in the IL-4/IL-10 high expression group. The IFN-γ and IL-2 levels were higher, while IL-4 and IL-10 level were lower in AITD patients with adverse pregnancy outcomes. Lastly, Th1 cytokines were higher and Th2 cytokines were lower in AITD patients and elicited correlation with Tregs and CD4+/CD8+ levels. Collectively, our findings highlighted that up-regulation of Th1 cytokines may increase the percentage of adverse pregnancy outcomes in AITD patients.

Construction of Magnetic Core-Large Mesoporous Satellite Immunosensor for Long-Lasting Chemiluminescence and Highly Sensitive Tumor Marker Determination.

Chemiluminescence immunoassay exhibits high sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio, thus attracting great attention in the early diagnosis and dynamic monitoring of diseases. However, the collection of conventional flash-type chemiluminescence signal (<5s) relies heavily on automatic sampling and reading instrument. Herein, a novel core-satellite multifunctional chemiluminescence immunosensor is designed for the efficient enrichment and highly sensitive determination of cancer biomarker carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) with enhanced and long-lasting output signal that can be conveniently recorded by a simple microplate plate reading instrument. Anti-CEA monoclonal antibody 2 (Ab2) modified Fe3 O4 @SiO2 microspheres (Fe3 O4 @SiO2 -Ab2, 370nm in diameter) are synthesized as the core for selectively capturing and enriching target CEA in solution, and anti-human CEA monoclonal antibody 1 (Ab1) and horseradish peroxidase (HRP) co-immobilized dendritic large-mesoporous silica nanospheres (MSNs-HRP/Ab1, 80nm in diameter, pore size: 17nm) are synthesized as the satellite for efficient immunological recognition and signal amplification. The as-designed core-satellite magnetic chemiluminescence immunosensors exhibit a broad linear range of 0.01-20ngmL-1 and a low detection limit of 3.0pgmL-1 for the convenient, highly specific, and sensitive determination of CEA in human serum. Such core-satellite chemiluminescence immunosensors are expected to act as a powerful tool for in vitro detection of various biomarkers, overcome the defect of conventional chemiluminescence relying heavily on expensive and bulky automatic instruments and popularize chemiluminescence analysis to primary medical institutions and remote areas.

Development of convolutional neural network algorithm on ships detection in Natuna Islands-Indonesia using land look satellite imagery

Indonesia's vast waters require much time and energy to monitor illegal fishing. Utilizing remote sensing technology is the right solution for monitoring, controlling, and surveying (MCS) systems. The phenomenon of particular concern to the ship detection process using a remote sensing system is the form of images with various positions due to the ship's rectangular and narrow dimensions and the high viewing angle from space. This condition differs if the shooting is carried out close to objects on the earth's surface. Considering the situation of recording data from a very far position, refining the convolutional neural network (CNN) method for processing remote sensing image data continues to be developed, primarily related to detecting ships. The latest development of the CNN algorithm shows its ability to see vessels by taking into account the orientation factor of objects at sea level with almost perfect accuracy. The problem is that the system needs to be able to detect in detail the movements and types of ships recorded by remote sensing satellite sensors. Therefore, an automatic ship detection instrument is needed based on Land look USGS base map high-resolution image data to maintain maritime sovereignty in Indonesia. Image data were acquired from the waters of the Natuna islands and taken at a scale of 1: 2000. The data obtained from the acquisition are five high-resolution image data 1680 × 840 pixels, in which there are 32 ship image data and 3100 non-ship image data 80 × 80 pixels. The ship image data is then processed by color and geometry augmentation to produce 1440 new data. The image processing stage afterward is reading and splitting the dataset, creating a CNN, and training and testing the CNN model. Based on the results of the ship and non-ship objects detection with the CNN model, the accuracy results are 99.78% and 99.24%, respectively.

Simulation-driven engineering for the management of harmful algal and cyanobacterial blooms

Harmful algal and cyanobacterial blooms (HABs), occurring in inland and maritime waters, pose threats to natural environments by producing toxins that affect human and animal health. In the past, HABs have been assessed mainly by the manual collection and subsequent analysis of water samples and occasionally by automatic instruments that acquire information from fixed locations. These procedures do not provide data with the desirable spatial and temporal resolution to anticipate the formation of HABs. Hence, new tools and technologies are needed to efficiently detect, characterize and respond to HABs that threaten water quality. It is essential nowadays when the world’s water supply is under tremendous pressure because of climate change, overexploitation, and pollution. This paper introduces Discrete Event System Specification-BLOOM, a novel framework for real-time monitoring and management of HABs. Its purpose is to support high-performance hazard detection with model-based system engineering and cyber-physical systems infrastructure for dynamic environments.

CGBA-Net: context-guided bidirectional attention network for surgical instrument segmentation.

Automatic surgical instrument segmentation is a crucial step for robotic-aided surgery. Encoder-decoder construction-based methods often directly fuse high-level and low-level features by skip connection to supplement some detailed information. However, irrelevant information fusion also increases misclassification or wrong segmentation, especially for complex surgical scenes. Uneven illumination always results in instruments similar to other tissues of background, which greatly increases the difficulty of automatic surgical instrument segmentation. The paper proposes a novel network to solve the problem. The paper proposes to guide the network to select effective features for instrument segmentation. The network is named context-guided bidirectional attention network (CGBANet). The guidance connection attention (GCA) module is inserted into the network to adaptively filter out irrelevant low-level features. Moreover, we propose bidirectional attention (BA) module for the GCA module to capture both local information and local-global dependency for surgical scenes to provide accurate instrument features. The superiority of our CGBA-Net is verified by multiple instrument segmentation on two publicly available datasets of different surgical scenarios, including an endoscopic vision dataset (EndoVis 2018) and a cataract surgery dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our CGBA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. Ablation study based on the datasets proves the effectiveness of our modules. The proposed CGBA-Net increased the accuracy of multiple instruments segmentation, which accurately classifies and segments the instruments. The proposed modules effectively provided instrument-related features for the network.

Multiple Mechanisms Synergistically Induce Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Multiple Drug Resistance

The aim of this study was to understand the molecular epidemiological characteristics and drug resistance mechanism of carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA) and to provide a theoretical basis for the prevention and treatment of CRPA infection in hospitals. A total of 34 CRPA strains were isolated, and resistance to 13 commonly used antibiotics was detected using the TDR-300B Plus VitEK-2 compact automatic bacterial identification instrument. Then, carbapenemase production was detected using the Carbe NP test. RT-qPCR was used to detect the expression of efflux pump MexA and outer membrane protein OprD, and PCR amplification and sequence analysis were used to detect class Ⅰ integrons carried by drug resistance genes. Our results showed that of the 34 CRPAs, 22 were multi-drug resistant (MDR), and five were extensively drug-resistant (XDR). Sequencing analysis showed that class Ⅰ integron mainly carried aminoglycosides or quinolones resistance genes. Multiple mechanisms play important roles in the formation and development of MDR or XDR.

Integrating MWCNTs-doped MXene with multi-spiral-channel architecture enables field effect transistor biosensor capable of ultrasensitive determination of methotrexate

Previous breakthroughs in biosensor diagnostics stem from engineering and nanocomposites. Accurately detecting low-abundance compounds such as methotrexate in complex biospecimens (e.g. serum) is an important clinical challenge. To address this issue, a MWCNTs-doped MXene-based multi-spiral-channel field-effect transistor (MMSFETs) biosensor was constructed for ultrasensitive quantification of methotrexate. Our integrated biosensor exhibited following merits: a) The synergetic performance of MXene and MWCNTs for enhanced transconductance (0.63 mS) and detection capability (methotrexate, linear range of 0.001–100 μM and LOD down to 0.352 nM); b) Favorable selectivity, stability (one month), reproducibility (RSD = 0.99%, n = 7) for biosensing of methotrexate; c) Acceptable clinical performances on comparisons of MMFETs against commercial Abbott automatic immunoluminescence instrument (ARCHITECT I1000): favorable linearity and correlation coefficient (YMMSFETs = 1.4305 × Xtargeted concentration + 4.3791 with R2 = 0.949), significant p value (7.68E-12 < 0.001) and diagnosis capability of AUC (0.9907). Those advantages are anticipated to pave an avenue to design of the FETs-based biosensor towards the point-of-care diagnostics applications.

Punicalagin inhibits hepatic lipid deposition in obese mice via AMPK/ACC pathway

Hepatic lipid deposition is one of the basic manifestations of obesity, and nowadays pharmacological treatment is the most important tool. Punicalagin(PU), a polyphenol derived from pomegranate peel, is a potential anti-obesity substance. In this study, 60 C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into a normal group and a model group. After establishing a model of simple obesity with a high-fat diet for 12 weeks, the successfully established rat models of obesity were then regrouped into a model group, an orlistat group, a PU low-dose group, a PU medium-dose group, and a PU high-dose group. The normal group was kept on routine diet and other groups continued to feed the high-fat diet. The body weight and food intake were measured and recorded weekly. After 8 weeks, the levels of the four lipids in the serum of each group of mice were determined by an automatic biochemical instrument. Oral glucose tole-rance and intraperitoneal insulin sensitivity were tested. Hemoxylin-eosin(HE) staining was applied to observe the hepatic and adipose tissues. The mRNA expression levels of peroxisome proliferators-activated receptor γ(PPARγ) and C/EBPα were determined by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction(Q-PCR), and the mRNA and protein expression levels of adenosine 5'-monophosphate-activated protein kinase(AMPK), anterior cingulate cortex(ACC), and carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1A(CPT1A) were determined by Western blot. Finally, the body mass, Lee's index, serum total glyceride(TG), serum total cholesterol(TC), and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol(LDL-C) levels were significantly higher and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol(HDL-C) levels were significantly lower in the model group as compared with the normal group. The fat deposition in the liver was significantly increased. The mRNA expression levels of hepatic PPARγ and C/EBPα and the protein expression level of ACC were increased, while the mRNA and protein expression levels of CPT-1α(CPT1A) and AMPK were decreased. After PU treatment, the above indexes of obese mice were reversed. In conclusion, PU can decrease the body weight of obese mice and control their food intake. It also plays a role in the regulation of lipid metabolism and glycometabolism metabolism, which can significantly improve hepatic fat deposition. Mechanistically, PU may regulate liver lipid deposition in obese mice by down-regulating lipid synthesis and up-regulating lipolysis through activation of the AMPK/ACC pathway.