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excessively cold sensations. [5] In contrast, hydrophobic textiles such as polyester can repel water on the outside, [6] but are useless against sweat on the inside. In recent years, considerable efforts have been made to improve the sweat transport through textiles, such as doublelayer hydrophobic/hydrophilic fabrics, [7] cotton fabrics printed with fluorocarbonbased hydrophobic finishes, [8] trilayered polyurethane/ (polyurethane-hydrolyzed polyacrylonitrile-SiO 2 )/ hydrolyzed polyacrylonitrile-SiO 2 fibrous membranes, [9] and biomimetic fibrous Murray membrane. [10] However, not much attention was paid to the dissipation of heat during the sweat transporting process. Since textiles thermal insulation can decrease, and the amount of reduction varies from 2 to 8% as related to water accumulation within textiles, [11] even resulting in hypothermia. Therefore, the development of a new functional textile to achieve efficient sweat transport and prevent undesired excessive cold is urgently needed.Directional water transport is a common phenomenon widely found in nature. [12] For example, spider silk with periodic conical spindle knots can drive water droplets toward spindle knots, [13] cactus spines can transport water directionally due to the curvature gradient on the surface of the spine, [14] and shorebirds can transport prey-laden water droplets toward their mouth by opening and closing their beaks. [15] These interesting phenomena of directional water transport originate from their unique asymmetric gradient structures. Therefore, construction of an asymmetric surface structure may be a method for designing functional textiles with effective sweat transport capability.Herein, we fabricated a hydrophobic/superhydrophilic Janus polyester/nitrocellulose textile with asymmetric hydrophilic conical micropores for directional liquid transport by a simple laser perforation method (Figure 1). This Janus polyester/ nitrocellulose textile can unidirectionally pump the excessive sweat from the hydrophobic layer to the superhydrophilic layer through asymmetric hydrophilic conical micropores from large to small (LTS) openings, thereby avoiding undesired sticky and excessive cold sensations from sweat. This study provides new information for the development of functional textiles that effectively manage excess sweat for comfortable skin microenvironments.A Janus polyester/nitrocellulose membrane is a kind of commercially available material that is widely used in microfluidic Excessive sweat secreted from the skin often causes undesired adhesion from wetted textiles and cold sensations. Traditional hydrophilic textiles such as cotton can absorb sweat but retain it. A hydrophobic/ superhydrophilic Janus polyester/nitrocellulose textile embedded with a conical micropore array with a hydrophilic inner surface that can achieve directional liquid transport (with an ultrahigh directional water transport capability of 1246%) and maintain human body temperature (2-3 °C higher than with cotton textiles) is demonstrated. When the hydr...

Although intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a devastating disease worldwide, the pathologic changes in ultrastructure during the acute and chronic phases of ICH are poorly described. In this study, transmission electron microscopy was used to examine the ultrastructure of ICH-induced pathology. ICH was induced in mice by an intrastriatal injection of collagenase. Pathologic changes were observed in the acute (3 days), subacute (6 days), and chronic (28 days) phases. Compared with sham animals, we observed various types of cell death in the injured striatum during the acute phase of ICH, including necrosis, ferroptosis, and autophagy. Different degrees of axon degeneration in the striatum were seen in the acute phase, and axonal demyelination was observed in the ipsilateral striatum and corpus callosum at late time points. In addition, phagocytes, resident microglia, and infiltrating monocyte-macrophages were present around red blood cells and degenerating neurons and were observed to engulf red blood cells and other debris. Many synapses appeared abnormal or were lost. This systematic analysis of the pathologic changes in ultrastructure after ICH in mice provides information that will be valuable for future ICH pathology studies.

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Hydrogels have been widely used for 3-dimensional (3D) cell culture and tissue regeneration due to their tunable biochemical and physicochemical properties as well as their high water content, which resembles the aqueous microenvironment of the natural extracellular matrix. While many properties of natural hydrogel matrices are modifiable, their intrinsic isotropic structure limits the control over cellular organization, which is critical to restore tissue function. Here we report a generic approach to incorporate alignment topography inside the hydrogel matrix using a combination of electrical and mechanical stretching. Hydrogel fibres with uniaxial alignment were prepared from aqueous solutions of natural polymers such as alginate, fibrin, gelatin, and hyaluronic acid under ambient conditions. The unique internal alignment feature drastically enhances the mechanical properties of the hydrogel microfibres. Furthermore, the facile, organic solvent-free processing conditions are amenable to the incorporation of live cells within the hydrogel fibre or on the fibre surface; both approaches effectively induce cellular alignment. This work demonstrates a versatile and scalable strategy to create aligned hydrogel microfibres from various natural polymers.

The rapid promotion of angiogenesis is critical for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The angiogenic activity of tissue-engineered scaffolds has already been the major criterion for choosing and designing ideal biological materials. We here report systematic in vivo studies on the angiogenic activity of two functionalized self-assembling peptides PRG (Ac-(RADA)(4)GPRGDSGYRGDS-CONH(2)) and KLT (Ac-(RADA)(4)G(4)KLTWQELYQLKYKGI-CONH(2)) using the chicken embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay. 3D migration/sprouting bead assays showed that the two functional motifs PRGDSGYRGDS and KLTWQELYQLKYKGI improved the bioactivities of the self-assembling peptide RADA16-I (Ac-(RADA)(4)-CONH(2)) dramatically and provided ideal synthetic microenvironments for endothelial cell migration and cordlike structure sprout formation. A CAM assay was carried out to assess the efficiency of various peptide scaffolds in inducing capillary invasion in vivo. Among these three peptide scaffolds, the functionalized peptide scaffold RAD/KLT presented a significantly better angiogenic activity inducing CAM tissue invasion and new capillary vessel formation within the scaffolds in the absence of VEGF. With the addition of VEGF, more newly formed vessel lumen could be observed in all peptide scaffolds. Our results suggested that the functionalized peptide scaffolds had satisfactory angiogenic properties, and may also have wide potential applications in tissue regeneration.

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Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality for males and females. Radiation therapy (RT) is one of the primary treatment modalities for lung cancer. While delivering the prescribed dose to tumor targets, it is essential to spare the tissues near the targets—the so-called organs-at-risk (OARs). An optimal RT planning benefits from the accurate segmentation of the gross tumor volume and surrounding OARs. Manual segmentation is a time-consuming and tedious task for radiation oncologists. Therefore, it is crucial to develop automatic image segmentation to relieve radiation oncologists of the tedious contouring work. Currently, the atlas-based automatic segmentation technique is commonly used in clinical routines. However, this technique depends heavily on the similarity between the atlas and the image segmented. With significant advances made in computer vision, deep learning as a part of artificial intelligence attracts increasing attention in medical image automatic segmentation. In this article, we reviewed deep learning based automatic segmentation techniques related to lung cancer and compared them with the atlas-based automatic segmentation technique. At present, the auto-segmentation of OARs with relatively large volume such as lung and heart etc. outperforms the organs with small volume such as esophagus. The average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of lung, heart and liver are over 0.9, and the best DSC of spinal cord reaches 0.9. However, the DSC of esophagus ranges between 0.71 and 0.87 with a ragged performance. In terms of the gross tumor volume, the average DSC is below 0.8. Although deep learning based automatic segmentation techniques indicate significant superiority in many aspects compared to manual segmentation, various issues still need to be solved. We discussed the potential issues in deep learning based automatic segmentation including low contrast, dataset size, consensus guidelines, and network design. Clinical limitations and future research directions of deep learning based automatic segmentation were discussed as well.