Circular RNAs were recently identified as a novel type of noncoding RNAs. An increasing number of reports have demonstrated their essential regulatory roles in various biological processes and human diseases, including cancer. However, the role of circRNA in cervical cancer (CC) remains largely unknown. In the current study, we investigated the physiological functions of circ_0067934 during CC development and progression. We found that circ_0067934 was overexpressed in CC tissues and cell lines. Circ_0067934 upregulation was associated with advanced stage, lymph node metastasis, and poor prognosis in CC patients. Knockdown of circ_0067934 suppressed the proliferation, colony formation, migration, invasion, and epithelial‐mesenchymal transition of CC cells in vitro. Circ_0067934 loss also inhibited CC tumor growth in vivo. Mechanistically, silencing circ_0067934 increased miR‐545 expression. MiR‐545 repressed EIF3C expression through targeting its 3′‐untranslated region. MiR‐545 suppressed the proliferation, migration, and invasion of CC cells, whereas restoration of EIF3C could rescue the effects of circ_0067934 knockdown. Taken together, our findings revealed that circ_0067934 promotes CC progression via miR‐545/EIF3C axis. Our study may provide a new insight into the pathogenesis of CC.

Gait analysis is a systematic collection of quantitative information on bodily movements during locomotion. Gait analysis has been employed clinically in stroke patients for their rehabilitation planning. In animal studies, gait analysis has been employed for the assessment of their locomotive disturbances in ischemic stroke, spinal cord injury and Parkinson's disease. The aims of the work reported here were to identify the gait parameters, collected from the computer-generated CatWalk System, that change after unilateral intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) in the acute stage and long term up to 56 days post-ICH. The results showed that with the collagenase-induced unilateral striatal lesion, the rats displayed a significant contralateral decrease in print and maximum contact area and paw intensity, a diagonal increase in the stance duration of the left front and right hind paws, a significant decrease in the stride length of all four limbs, and foot pattern instability as reflected by the base of support, support on styles, and cadence. These deficits, including those in print area, stance and pressure, were demonstrated throughout the long-term period following ICH. The correlations between the gait parameters, lesion volume and asymmetrical forelimb use were also reported in this paper. This work has provided a systematic description on gait parameters in the classical striatal ICH model, which might become an essential assessment tool in future studies of pathophysiology and the development of novel treatments for experimental unilateral intracerebral hemorrhage with gait deficits.

BackgroundUltrasonography is a convenient technique to investigate muscle properties and has been widely used to look into muscle functions since it is non-invasive and real-time. Muscle thickness, a quantification which can effectively reflect the muscle activities during muscle contraction, is an important measure for musculoskeletal studies using ultrasonography. The traditional manual operation to read muscle thickness is subjective and time-consuming, therefore a number of studies have focused on the automatic estimation of muscle fascicle orientation and muscle thickness, to which the speckle noises in ultrasound images could be the major obstacle. There have been two popular methods proposed to enhance the hyperechoic regions over the speckles in ultrasonography, namely Gabor Filtering and Multiscale Vessel Enhancement Filtering (MVEF).MethodsA study on gastrocnemius muscle is conducted to quantitatively evaluate whether and how these two methods could help the automatic estimation of the muscle thickness based on Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT). The muscle thickness results obtained from each of the two methods are compared with the results from manual measurement, respectively. Data from an aged subject with cerebral infarction is also studied.ResultsIt’s shown in the experiments that, Gabor Filtering and MVEF can both enable RVHT to generate comparable results of muscle thickness to those by manual drawing (mean ± SD, 1.45 ± 0.48 and 1.38 ± 0.56 mm respectively). However, the MVEF method requires much less computation than Gabor Filtering.ConclusionsBoth methods, as preprocessing procedure can enable RVHT the automatic estimation of muscle thickness and MVEF is believed to be a better choice for real-time applications.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide, particularly in Asian populations, and responds poorly to conventional therapy. Subclassification of ESCCs by molecular analysis is a powerful strategy in extending conventional clinicopathologic classification, improving prognosis and therapy. Here we identified two ESCC molecular subtypes in Chinese population using gene expression profiling data and further validated the molecular subtypes in two other independent Asian populations (Japanese and Vietnamese). Subtype I ESCCs were enriched in pathways including immune response, while genes overexpressed in subtype II ESCCs were mainly involved in ectoderm development, glycolysis process, and cell proliferation. Specifically, we identified potential ESCC subtype-specific diagnostic markers (FOXA1 and EYA2 for subtype I, LAMC2 and KRT14 for subtype II) and further validated them in a fourth Asian cohort. In addition, we propose a few subtype-specific therapeutic targets for ESCC, which may guide future ESCC clinical treatment when further validated.

Increasing evidence indicates that inflammatory responses may influence brain neurochemical pathways, inducing depressive-like behaviors. Ultrasound stimulation (US) is a promising non-invasive treatment for neuropsychiatric diseases. We investigated whether US can suppress inflammation and improve depressive-like behaviors. Mice were intraperitoneally injected with lipopolysaccharide to induce depressive-like behaviors. Ultrasound wave was delivered into the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for 30 min. Depressive- and anxiety-like behaviors were evaluated through the forced swimming test (FST), tail suspension test (TST), and elevated plus maze (EPM). Biochemical analyses were performed to assess the expression of inflammatory cytokines in the PFC and serum. The results indicated that US of the PFC significantly improved depressive-like behaviors in the TST (p < 0.05) and FST (p < 0.05). Anxiety-like behaviors also improved in the EPM (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the lipopolysaccharide-mediated upregulation of IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α in the PFC was significantly reduced (p < 0.05) by US. In addition, no tissue damage was observed. Overall, US of PFC can effectively improve lipopolysaccharide-induced depressive-like behaviors, possibly through the downregulation of inflammatory cytokines in the PFC. US may be a safe and promising tool for improvement of depression.