The segmentation of various retinal layers is vital for diagnosing and tracking progress of medication of various ocular diseases. Due to the complexity of retinal structures, the tediousness of manual segmentation and variation from different specialists, many methods have been proposed to aid with this analysis. However image artifacts, in addition to inhomogeneity in pathological structures, remain a challenge, with negative influence on the performance of segmentation algorithms. Previous attempts normally pre-process the images or model the segmentation to handle the obstruction but it still remains an area of active research, especially in relation to the graph based algorithms. In this paper we present an automatic retinal layer segmentation method, which is comprised of fuzzy histogram hyperbolization and graph cut methods to segment 8 boundaries and 7 layers of the retina on 150 OCT B-Sans images, 50 each from the temporal, nasal and centre of foveal region. Our method shows positive results, with additional tolerance and adaptability to contour variance and pathological inconsistency of the retinal structures in all regions.

Melt electrospinning is a technique capable of producing micro-and nanofibers with the advantages of being eco-friendly, cost-effective, and applied in many areas such as nonwovens with high performance, biomedicine, high-efficiency filtration, oil sorption, and many others. This chapter describes the current trends on melt electrospinning including advancements in the technique, processing parameters, materials, apparatus, and areas of applications. Melt differential electrospinning which is a new technique for nanofiber production invented by our innovation team of advanced polymer processing has been introduced. Future perspectives on melt electrospinning are also proposed.

Polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) superfine fiber is a promising high efficient material for high temperature dedusting. In this paper, the PPS superfine fiber was prepared by melt-electrospinning for the first time. In order to produce the finer fibers, the polypropylene (PP) was added to PPS and the effects of blending ratio, spinning voltage, spinning temperature, and spinning distance on resultant fibers were investigated systematically. The superfine fibers of PPS with an average diameter of 4.12 μm were successfully prepared at the optimized condition, which was one third of that by melt-spinning method. With the decrease of 76.21 % fibers diameter, the filter efficiency increased from 87.03 % to 98.05 %. The presented method provides a new way for the scalable and green fabrication of PPS superfine fibers.

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Abstract

Objectives: The goal of this study was to determine the correlation of clinicopathological factors and the up-regulation of Int-8 receptors and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC).

Materials and Methods: Clinical data (age, gender, size of the tumor, location of the tumor, lymph nodes status,..) were collected from 20 patients with OSCC, tabulated and statistically analyzed (SPSS17).Immunohistochemical stainings of Int-8 receptors, CXCR1 and CXCR2 (united states biological, United Bio, USA) and VEGF (Abcam, Cambridge, MA, USA) were done.

Results: Our immunohistochemical study demonstrated: 1)expression of Int-8 receptors in all cases of OSCC with variable intensities, 2) high-level staining of VEGF In poorly differentiated and invasive oral squamous cell carcinoma. Significant correlation was observed between immunohistochemical expression of Int-8 receptors, VEGF and histologic differentiation and clinical stages(Analysis of variance ANOVA, P<0.05).

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the reactivity to Int-8 receptors

observed in OSCC cases could be used as a parameter for tumor aggressiveness and as potential prognostic marker. Also, up-regulation of VEGF may play a role in the angiogenesis and progression of oral squamous cell carcinoma.

Purpose: The first aim of this study was to analyse the presence of circulating Claudin 4 (CLDN4) mRNA in serum and to evaluate whether the rate of CLDN4 mRNA can be used as a tumor marker to discriminate breast cancer patients and healthy women. The second aim was to compare CLDN4 mRNA measured using real-time quantitative RT-PCR with CA 15-3 measured using immunoassay as biomarker for the diagnosis of breast cancer.

Experimental Design: The present study collected serum samples

from 118 patients with recently diagnosed breast cancer and 30 matched healthy women. The number of copies of CLDN4 mRNA and the CA-15-3 rate were analysed and the percentage of patients with increased marker level were compared.

Results: The quality and the stability of mRNA which were evaluated

using the housekeeping RPLPO gene in all studied serum samples were confirmed (p>0.05). The expression level of CLDN4 mRNA was found significantly increased in serum of 64% patients with breast cancer from the threshold calculated in healthy women (p<0.001) versus 6% for CA 15-3. The expression of claudin4 was not correlated with histological type, tumour size, nodal status, tumor grade, and status of ER, PR and Her2 but only with age.

Conclusions:

Our results showed that the expression of CLDN4 mRNA by real-time quantitative PCR give the opportunity to predict breast cancer before pathological diagnosis in a large majority of patients.