Ginsan, a polysaccharide extracted from Panax ginseng, has multiple immunomodulatory effects. In this study, we show that pretreatment of ginsan (25 lg/kg) protected mice from lethality induced by Staphylococcus aureus challenge. This survival benefit was associated with enhanced bacterial clearance from circulation, spleen and kidney. The phagocytic activity of macrophages treated with ginsan was significantly enhanced against S. aureus. However, the production of proinflammatory cytokines, such as TNFa, IL-1b, IL-6, IFN-c, IL-12, and IL-18, was markedly down-regulated in ginsan-treated mice compared with those of control-infected mice. The expression of Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 and the adaptor molecule MyD88, which was greatly increased in septic macrophages, was significantly reduced by ginsan treatment in vitro. Similarly, the expression of phospho-JNK1/2, phospho-p38 MAPK, and NF-jB was decreased in the same culture system. These results illustrate that the antiseptic activity of ginsan can be attributed to enhanced bacterial clearance, and reduced proinflammatory cytokines via the TLR signaling pathway.

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Abstract. The quality of the fingerprint images greatly affects the performance of the minutiae extraction. In order to improve the performance of the system, many researchers have been made efforts on the image enhancement algorithms. If the adaptive preprocessing according to the fingerprint image characteristics is applied in the image enhancement step, the system performance would be more robust. In this paper, we propose an adaptive preprocessing method, which extracts five features from the fingerprint images, analyzes image quality with Ward's clustering algorithm, and enhances the images according to their characteristics. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method improves both the quality index and block directional difference significantly in a reasonable time.

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