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ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to analyze the effects of acupuncture on peripheral immune function, inflammation, and cognitive impairment in vascular dementia (VD) rats.MethodsIn this study, 2-month-old healthy male Wistar rats (260–280 g) were assigned to the groups as follows: normal group (Gn, n = 10), sham-operated group (Gs, n = 10), and operated group (Go, n = 45). The Go group was established by permanent, bilateral common carotid artery occlusion (BCCAO). Two months after operation, the operated rats were screened by hidden platform trial and the rats with cognitive dysfunction were further randomly divided into impaired group (Gi), acupoint group (Ga), and non-acupoint group (Gna) with 10 rats in each group. The Ga group was given acupuncture treatment for 14 days with a rest for every 7 days. After treatment, the Morris water maze (MWM) test was performed to evaluate the spatial learning and memory abilities of rats. The lymphocyte subsets in peripheral blood and spleen of rats were measured by flow cytometry. The levels of cytokines [i.e., interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-2, IL-4, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and interferon-γ (INF-γ)], chemokines (i.e., macrophage inflammatory protein-2 (MIP-2)), and other inflammatory mediators (i.e., cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS)) in peripheral blood and hippocampus were measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).ResultsCompared with the Gn group, the Gi rats presented long escape latencies to find the platform. After acupuncture treatment, the escape latencies of the Ga group were rescued markedly when compared with the Gi group (P < 0.05). The proportion of CD4 + T lymphocytes in both spleen and peripheral blood in the Ga group increased (P < 0.05) in comparison with the Gi group. There is an obvious reduction in IL-1β (P < 0.05), IL-2 (P < 0.05), TNF-α (P < 0.01), INF-γ (P < 0.01), MIP-2 (P < 0.05), and iNOS (P < 0.01), coming along with the increased levels of IL-4 and IL-10 (P < 0.01) in the Ga group when compared with the Gi group. In addition, the hippocampus proinflammatory factors IL-1β (P < 0.01), IL-2 (P < 0.01), TNF-α (P < 0.05), INF-γ (P < 0.05), MIP-2 (P < 0.05), iNOS (P < 0.01), and COX-2 decreased in the Ga group, whereas the anti-inflammatory factors IL-4 and IL-10 (P < 0.01) increased.ConclusionThere are abnormal immune function and peripheral inflammation in VD rats. Acupuncture can regulate the peripheral immune function and inflammation of the VD rats and can improve the cognitive dysfunction of the rats.

Effectively detecting road boundaries in real time is critical to the applications of autonomous vehicles, such as vehicle localization, path planning, and environmental understanding. To precisely extract the irregular road boundaries or those blocked by obstructions on the road from the 3D LiDAR data, a dedicated algorithm consisting of four steps is proposed in this paper. The steps are as follows. First, the 3D LiDAR data is pre-processed, employing the vehicle position and attitude information, and many noise points are deleted. Second, the ground points are quickly separated from the pre-processed point cloud data to reduce the disturbance from the obstacles on the road; this greatly decreases the size of the points cloud to be processed. Third, the candidate points of the road boundaries are searched along the predicted trajectory of the autonomous vehicle and filtered using the unique features of the boundary points. Last, a spline fit model is applied to smoothen the road boundaries. An experiment to test the performance of the proposed algorithm was conducted on the ''Xinda'' autonomous vehicle under various road scenarios. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of the proposed algorithm exceeds 93%, and its average processing time is approximately 36.5 ms/frame, which outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods. This indicates that the proposed algorithm can robustly extract the road boundary in real time even if there are many obstacles on the road. This algorithm has been tested on ''Xinda'' autonomous vehicle for over 1000 kilometers, and its performance was always stable. INDEX TERMS Autonomous vehicle, 3D LiDAR point cloud, road boundary detection, search boundary point, spline model, obstacle occlusion.

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