In this review, most of the known and postulated mechanisms of osteopontin (OPN) and its role in bone remodeling and orthodontic tooth movement are discussed based on available literature. OPN, a multifunctional protein, is considered crucial for bone remodeling, biomineralization, and periodontal remodeling during mechanical tension and stress (orthodontic tooth movement). It contributes to bone remodeling by promoting osteoclastogenesis and osteoclast activity through CD44- and αvβ3-mediated cell signaling. Further, it has a definitive role in bone remodeling by the formation of podosomes, osteoclast survival, and osteoclast motility. OPN has been shown to have a regulatory effect on hydroxyapatite crystal (HAP) growth and potently inhibits the mineralization of osteoblast cultures in a phosphate-dependent manner. Bone remodeling is vital for orthodontic tooth movement. Significant compressive and tensional forces on the periodontium induce the signaling pathways mediated by various osteogenic genes including OPN, bone sialoprotein, Osterix, and osteocalcin. The signaling pathways involved in the regulation of OPN and its effect on the periodontal tissues during orthodontic tooth movement are further discussed in this review. A limited number of studies have suggested the use of OPN as a biomarker to assess orthodontic treatment. Furthermore, the association of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in OPN coding gene Spp1 with orthodontically induced root resorption remains largely unexplored. Accordingly, future research directions for OPN are outlined in this review.

Although the types of sexual concerns vary in frequency, women aged 65 and older have a similar number of sexual concerns as younger women. Older women want physicians to inquire about their sexual health. This discussion should include inquiries about their partner's sexual functioning. To overcome age as a barrier to this discussion, younger physicians should be particularly attentive to initiating the topic of sexual health.

Drone systems have been deployed by various law enforcement agencies to monitor hostiles, spy on foreign drug cartels, conduct border control operations, etc. This paper introduces a real-time drone surveillance system to identify violent individuals in public areas. The system first uses the Feature Pyramid Network to detect humans from aerial images. The image region with the human is used by the proposed ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning (SHDL) network for human pose estimation. The orientations between the limbs of the estimated pose are next used to identify the violent individuals. The proposed deep network can learn meaningful representations quickly using ScatterNet and structural priors with relatively fewer labeled examples. The system detects the violent individuals in real-time by processing the drone images in the cloud. This research also introduces the aerial violent individual dataset used for training the deep network which hopefully may encourage researchers interested in using deep learning for aerial surveillance. The pose estimation and violent individuals identification performance is compared with the state-ofthe-art techniques.

We introduce a ScatterNet that uses a parametric log transformation with Dual-Tree complex wavelets to extract translation invariant representations from a multi-resolution image. The parametric transformation aids the OLS pruning algorithm by converting the skewed distributions into relatively mean-symmetric distributions while the Dual-Tree wavelets improve the computational efficiency of the network. The proposed network is shown to outperform Mallat's Scatter-Net [1] on two image datasets, both for classification accuracy and computational efficiency. The advantages of the proposed network over other supervised and some unsupervised methods are also presented using experiments performed on different training dataset sizes.

SUMMARY:In this first article, we review the basic principles of using reporter genes for molecular imaging of the brain in living subjects. This approach is emerging as a valuable tool for monitoring gene expression in diverse applications in laboratory animals, including the study of gene-targeted and trafficking cells, gene therapies, transgenic animals, and more complex molecular interactions within the central nervous system. Further development of more sensitive and selective reporters, combined with improvements in detection technology, will consolidate the position of in vivo reporter gene imaging as a versatile method for greater understanding of intracellular biologic processes and underlying molecular neuropathology and will potentially establish a future role in the clinical management of patients with neurologic diseases. M olecular imaging is the latest addition in an astounding evolution of imaging during the past few decades, bringing in vivo observations to a new and more meaningful dimension. Its novelty lies in the fact that unlike the traditional means of imaging living subjects, which rely on nonspecific macroscopic physical, physiologic, or metabolic changes to differentiate pathologic from normal tissue, molecular imaging seeks to shed new light on both structure and function by creating images that directly or indirectly reflect specific cellular and molecular events (eg, gene expression), which can reveal pathways and mechanisms responsible for disease within the context of physiologically authentic and intact living subject environments. This change in emphasis from a nonspecific to a more specific imaging approach represents a significant paradigm shift in neuroradiology. The impact of this shift in philosophy means that molecular neuroimaging could now provide the potential for the following: 1) understanding a patient's abnormal biology in a quick noninvasive manner, and with less labor, than that achievable by conventional pathology or clinical chemistry-based assays; 2) earlier detection and characterization of disease and its pathogenesis; and 3) assessment of the therapeutic effectiveness at a molecular level, long before phenotypic change. Many of the attributes of this new imaging discipline are already being exploited in the laboratory, where molecular neuroimaging techniques are currently used in research animals to develop and validate these novel imaging strategies, with a view to future extrapolation to the clinical setting.2,3 We and others have previously reviewed the factors contributing to the emergence of molecular imaging, the particular advantages of these approaches, and the general goals potentially achievable in biomedical research and clinical practice by adopting molecular imaging strategies.