Aspirin suppresses hepatocellular carcinoma progression by inhibiting platelet activity

BACKGROUND Hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)is the most common malignant liver disease in the world.Platelets(PLTs)are known to play a key role in the maintenance of liver homeostasis and the pathophysiological processes of a variety of liver diseases.Aspirin is the most classic antiplatelet agent.However,the molecular mechanism of platelet action and whether aspirin can affect HCC progression by inhibiting platelet activity need further study.AIM To explore the impact of the antiplatelet effect of aspirin on the development of HCC.METHODS Platelet-rich plasma,platelet plasma,pure platelet,and platelet lysate were prepared,and a coculture model of PLTs and HCC cells was established.CCK-8 analysis,apoptosis analysis,Transwell analysis,and real-time polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR)were used to analyze the effects of PLTs on the growth,metastasis,and inflammatory microenvironment of HCC.RT-PCR and Western blot were used to detect the effects of platelet activation on tumor-related signaling pathways.Aspirin was used to block the activation and aggregation of PLTs both in vitro and in vivo,and the effect of PLTs on the progression of HCC RESULTS PLTs significantly promoted the growth,invasion,epithelial-mesenchymal transition,and formation of an inflammatory microenvironment in HCC cells.Activated PLTs promoted HCC progression by activating the mitogenactivated protein kinase/protein kinase B/signal transducer and activator of transcription three(MAPK/AKT/STAT3)signaling axis.Additionally,aspirin inhibited HCC progression in vitro and in vivo by inhibiting platelet activation.CONCLUSION PLTs play an important role in the pathogenesis of HCC,and aspirin can affect HCC progression by inhibiting platelet activity.These results suggest that antiplatelet therapy has promising application prospects in the treatment and combined treatment of HCC.

A method to avoid the cycle-skip phenomenon in time-of-flight determination for ultrasonic flow measurement

The double-threshold method has been widely used in ultrasonic flow measurement to determine time-of-flight(TOF)due to its low cost and ease of implementation.Performance of this method is negatively affected by the cycle-skip phenomenon which occurs frequently under inconstant working conditions,especially varied fluid temperature.This paper proposes a method to suppress the phenomenon to facilitate reliable determination of TOF in ultrasonic flow measurement.First,the double-threshold method is used to generate a feature point to segment the signal.Second,based on the correlation coefficient and signal power,judgement factors of individual signal periods are calculated to determine signal onset.Finally,a valid zero crossing which has a constant lag from the onset is selected to determine the TOF.Thus,the cycle-skip phenomenon is suppressed.Two additional modifications are proposed to eliminate the influence of varied signal frequency and low sampling rate.The proposed method was validated by an experiment based on an ultrasonic water flow sensor.Results showed that the frequently appearing cycle-skip phenomenon can be successfully suppressed by the proposed method.