We investigate the potential of mobile smartphone-based multispectral imaging for the quantitative diagnosis and management of skin lesions. Recently, various mobile devices such as a smartphone have emerged as healthcare tools. They have been applied for the early diagnosis of nonmalignant and malignant skin diseases. Particularly, when they are combined with an advanced optical imaging technique such as multispectral imaging and analysis, it would be beneficial for the early diagnosis of such skin diseases and for further quantitative prognosis monitoring after treatment at home. Thus, we demonstrate here the development of a smartphone-based multispectral imaging system with high portability and its potential for mobile skin diagnosis. The results suggest that smartphone-based multispectral imaging and analysis has great potential as a healthcare tool for quantitative mobile skin diagnosis.
For appropriate treatment, accurate discrimination between seborrheic dermatitis and psoriasis in a timely manner is crucial to avoid complications. However, when they occur on the scalp, differential diagnosis can be challenging using conventional dermascopes. Thus, we employed smartphone-based multispectral imaging and analysis to discriminate between them with high accuracy. A smartphone-based multispectral imaging system, suited for scalp disease diagnosis, was redesigned. We compared the outcomes obtained using machine learning-based and conventional spectral classification methods to achieve better discrimination. The results demonstrated that smartphone-based multispectral imaging and analysis has great potential for discriminating between these diseases.
Artificial activation of oocytes is a pre-requisite for successful cloning by nuclear transfer (NT). This study investigated effect of different combination of activation chemicals such as electric pulse (E), thimerosal (Thi) + dithiothreitol (DTT), 6-dimethylaminopurine (6-DMAP), or cycloheximide (CH) on the developmental ability and the frequency of apoptosis of porcine NT embryos during the culture in vitro. NT embryos activated with chemicals showed significantly higher developmental rate to blastocyst stage compared to embryos activated with E alone (21.5%-26.6% vs. 15.7%, respectively). Of chemicals, Thi + DTT supported higher development to blastocyst stage as compared to 6-DMAP or CH (26.6% vs. 21.5%-23.4%, respectively). Apoptosis of NT embryos were analyzed by using a terminal deoxynucleatidyl transferase-mediated deoxyuridine 5-triphosphate nick-end labeling (TUNEL) assay. The onset of apoptosis of embryos activated E alone was on Day 4, whereas embryos activated with chemicals showed apoptosis on Day 3 post-activation NT embryos exposed to chemicals for activation had higher frequency of apoptosis compared to that of embryos exposed to E alone from Day 3 to Day 7 during the culture. In conclusion, this study shows that chemical activation after fusion could increase not only the developmental ability of porcine NT embryos but also the mean cell number with an increased ratio of inner cell mass (ICM) to trophectoderm (TE) cells. However, the chemical activation also could increase the frequency of apoptosis and induced apoptosis earlier in porcine NT embryos.
Abstract. We studied the effects of trichostatin A (TSA), a histone deacetylase inhibitor, on the development of bovine somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) embryos by investigating (1) the optimal concentration and treatment time of TSA for development of bovine SCNT embryos, (2) the status of histone acetylation in TSA-treated and control SCNT embryos and (3) the expression of histone acetylation-and deacetylation-related genes in TSA-treated and control SCNT embryos. We observed that 50 nM TSA-treatment for 20 h following fusion resulted in more efficient in vitro development of bovine SCNT embryos to the blastocyst stage. In regard to histone H4K5 acetylation, half of the control SCNT embryos faintly displayed histone H4K5 signals 30 min after electrofusion, while most of the TSA-treated SCNT embryos displayed histone H4K5 signals within 30 min after electrofusion. Furthermore, the expressions of HDAC1 and HDAC2 in the blastocysts were significantly lower (P<0.05) in the TSA-treated SCNT than in the control SCNT. However, the expression of GCN5 and HAT1 did not differ between the TSA-treated and control SCNT. In conclusion, we demonstrated that TSA-treatment after SCNT in bovine embryos can dramatically improve the practical applications of current cloning techniques. the survival rates to birth for cloned blastocysts is only 1 to 5% compared with a 30 to 60% birthrate for in vitro fertilization (IVF) blastocysts [11]. A serious impediment to the practical use of SCNT techniques is the low viability of cloned embryos during embryonic development; only a few percent of reconstructed oocytes develop to term, and of those, many die shortly after birth [5][6][7]12]. Even the surviving offspring show large placentas [7,[13][14][15] and increased birth weights [16], a phenomenon referred to as "large offspring syndrome" (LOS). Furthermore, some offspring with a seemingly healthy appearance suffer from immune dysfunction or kidney/brain malformations, which contribute to death [3,17].It is, however, unclear whether the development failures of cloned embryos are due to incomplete nuclear reprogramming or the cloning procedure itself. Nuclear transfer involves a series of complex procedures including culture of donor cells, in vitro maturation of oocytes, enucleation, cell or nuclear injection, fusion, activation, in vitro culture of reconstructed embryos and embryo transfer [18]. If any component of these steps is suboptimal, the production of cloned embryos or animals can be influenced. Reprogramming events following the transfer of somatic nuclei into oocyte cytoplasm occur at the epigenetic level. One of the many currently known epigenetic modalities is the global level and local pattern of acetylation of nuclear histones [19]. The extent to which reprogramming after nuclear transfer (NT) depends upon reshaping by histone acetylation, if at all, is not clear. Increased histone acetylation levels in most amino acid residues lead to loose binding of the nucleosome to DNA and/or linker histones, relaxation of the ch...
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