A Potential Model for Detecting Crowding-induced Epithelial Cell and Cancer Cell Extrusion

Overcrowding and cell deformation lead to the shedding of apoptotic and live cells to maintain homeostasis in the epithelium. Recent studies have attempted to explain the effect of extrusion on epithelial homeostasis and tumor metastasis, but lack the requisite quantitative models for testing extrusion. Here, we designed a petri dish inversion model to detect the extrusion ability of both normal epithelial cells and epithelial cancer cells. Firstly, we found cell extrusion was observed in both normal epithelial cells (LO2 cells) and cancer cells;in confluent LO2 cell culture, certain cells were surrounded by their neighbors, suffered "collective attack", and were then made round in shape. Green fluorescent protein (GFP)-labeled cancer cells were also found to be squeezed by normal LO2 cells. Using the petri dish inversion model, we quantified the number of extrusion cells, and demonstrated that the ability of cancer cell extrusion was related to the metastatic potential of cancer cell lines. Our findings provide a novel model to detect crowdinginduced epithelial cell and cancer cell extrusion. This novel model provides a quantitative method for research into apoptotic and cancer cell extrusion, particularly in human hepatocellular carcinoma.

Dissipative preparation of multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states of Rydberg atoms

The multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger(GHZ)states play an important role in large-scale quantum information processing.We utilize the polychromatic driving fields and the engineered spontaneous emissions of Rydberg states to dissipatively drive three-and four-partite neutral atom systems into the steady GHZ states,at the presence of the nextnearest neighbor interaction of excited Rydberg states.Furthermore,the introduction of quantum Lyapunov control can help us optimize the dissipative dynamics of the system so as to shorten the convergence time of the target state,improve the robustness against the spontaneous radiations of the excited Rydberg states,and release the limiting condition for the strengths of the polychromatic driving fields.Under the feasible experimental conditions,the fidelities of three-and four-partite GHZ states can be stabilized at 99.24%and 98.76%,respectively.

Vasculogenic mimicry:a pivotal mechanism contributing to drug resistance in antiangiogenic therapy

The growth of solid tumors relies on establishing a robust blood supply,with angiogenesis playing a key role in this intricate process.Based on this understanding,therapeutic strategies targeting tumor angiogenesis have been developed.However,the clinical effectiveness of antiangiogenic therapy(AAT)in treating tumors has not lived up to expectations.In recent years,vasculogenic mimicry(VM)has attracted increasing attention from the academic community as a longstanding but often overlooked mechanism of nonangiogenic tumor vascularization.Within the tumor microenvironment,neoplastic cells can autonomously form vessel-like structures,creating a blood supply that does not rely on endothelial cells.This phenomenon,known as VM,is a critical marker of aggressive tumors and may play a significant role in conferring resistance to AAT.In this review,we thoroughly examine the evidence,clinical characteristics,and mechanisms of VM across various tumor types and explore its potential role and importance in resistance to AAT and the development of new antitumor therapies.

K-nearest neighborhood based integration of time-of-flight cameras and passive stereo for high-accuracy depth maps?

Both time-of-flight(ToF) cameras and passive stereo can provide the depth information for their corresponding captured real scenes, but they have innate limitations. ToF cameras and passive stereo are intrinsically complementary for certain tasks. It is desirable to appropriately leverage all the available information by ToF cameras and passive stereo. Although some fusion methods have been presented recently, they fail to consider ToF reliability detection and ToF based improvement of passive stereo. As a result, this study proposes an approach to integrating ToF cameras and passive stereo to obtain high-accuracy depth maps. The main contributions are:(1) An energy cost function is devised to use data from ToF cameras to boost the stereo matching of passive stereo;(2) A fusion method is used to combine the depth information from both ToF cameras and passive stereo to obtain high-accuracy depth maps. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves improved results with high accuracy and robustness.

Optimizing inter-view prediction structures for multi-view video coding using simulated annealing

New video applications, such as 3D video and free viewpoint video, require efficient compression of multi-view video. In addition to temporal redundancy, exploiting the inter-view redundancy is crucial to improve the performance of multi-view video coding. In this paper, we present a novel method to construct the optimal inter-view prediction structure for multi-view video coding using simulated annealing. In the proposed model, the design of the prediction structure is converted to the arrangement of coding order. Then, a simulated annealing algorithm is employed to minimize the total cost for obtaining the best coding order. This method is applicable to arbitrary irregular camera arrangements. As experiment results reveal, the annealing process converges to satisfactory results rapidly and the generated optimal prediction structure outperforms the reference prediction structure of the joint multi-view video model (JMVM) by 0.1-0.8 dB PSNR gains.

Accurate real-time stereo correspondence using intra- and inter-scanline optimization

This paper deals with a novel stereo algorithm that can generate accurate dense disparity maps in real time. The algorithm employs an effective cross-based variable support aggregation strategy within a scanline optimization framework. Rather than matching intensities directly, the use of adaptive support aggregation allows for precisely handling the weak textured regions as well as depth discontinuities. To improve the disparity results with global reasoning, we reformulate the energy function on a tree structure over the whole 2D image area, as opposed to dynamic programming of individual scanlines. By applying both intra- and inter-scanline optimizations, the algorithm reduces the typical 'streaking' artifact while maintaining high computational efficiency. The experimental results are evaluated on the Middlebury stereo dataset, showing that our approach is among the best for all real-time approaches. We implement the algorithm on a commodity graphics card with CUDA architecture, running at about 35 fames/s for a typical stereo pair with a resolution of 384×288 and 16 disparity levels.

Depth-aided inpainting for disocclusion restoration of multi-view images using depth-image-based rendering

A new algorithm is proposed for restoring disocclusion regions in depth-image-based rendering （DIBR） warped images. Current solutions include layered depth image （LDI）, pre-filtering methods, and post-processing methods. The LDI is complicated, and pre-filtering of depth images causes noticeable geometrical distortions in cases of large baseline warping. This paper presents a depth-aided inpainting method which inherits merits from Criminisi＇s inpainting algorithm. The proposed method features incorporation of a depth cue into texture estimation. The algorithm efficiently handles depth ambiguity by penalizing larger Lagrange multipliers of flling points closer to the warping position compared with the surrounding existing points. We perform morphological operations on depth images to accelerate the algorithm convergence, and adopt a luma-first strategy to adapt to various color sampling formats. Experiments on test multi-view sequence showed that our method has superiority in depth differentiation and geometrical loyalty in the restoration of warped images. Also, peak signal-to-noise ratio （PSNR） statistics on non-hole regions and whole image comparisons both compare favorably to those obtained by state of the art techniques.