UNASSIGNED: Patients with anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (anti-NMDAR) encephalitis often experience severe symptoms. Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) has revealed widespread impairment of functional networks in patients. However, the changes in information flow remain unclear. This study aims to investigate the intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) both within and between resting-state networks (RSNs), as well as the alterations in effective connectivity (EC) between these networks.
UNASSIGNED: Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data were collected from 25 patients with anti-NMDAR encephalitis and 30 healthy controls (HCs) matched for age, sex, and educational level. Changes in the intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) within and between RSNs were analyzed using independent component analysis (ICA). The functional interaction between RSNs was identified by granger causality analysis (GCA).
UNASSIGNED: Compared to HCs, patients with anti-NMDAR encephalitis exhibited lower performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), both in terms of correct numbers and correct categories. Additionally, these patients demonstrated decreased scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Neuroimaging studies revealed abnormal intra-FC within the default mode network (DMN), increased intra-FC within the visual network (VN) and dorsal attention network (DAN), as well as increased inter-FC between VN and the frontoparietal network (FPN). Furthermore, aberrant effective connectivity (EC) was observed among the DMN, DAN, FPN, VN, and somatomotor network (SMN).
UNASSIGNED: Patients with anti-NMDAR encephalitis displayed noticeable deficits in both memory and executive function. Notably, these patients exhibited widespread impairments in intra-FC, inter-FC, and EC. These results may help to explain the pathophysiological mechanism of anti-NMDAR encephalitis.

UNASSIGNED: To investigate how passive hyperthermia affect the resting-state functional brain activity based on an acute mouse model after heat stress exposure.
UNASSIGNED: Twenty-eight rs-fMRI data of C57BL/6J male mice which weighing about 24 ∼ 29 g and aged 12 ∼ 16 weeks were collected. The mice in the hyperthermia group (HT, 40 °C ± 0.5 °C, 40 min) were subjected to passive hyperthermia before the anesthesia preparation for scanning. While the normal control group (NC) was subjected to normothermia condition (NC, 20 °C ± 2 °C, 40 min). After data preprocessing, we performed independent component analysis (ICA) and region of interested (ROI)-ROI functional connectivity (FC) analyses on the data of both HT (n = 13) and NC (n = 15).
UNASSIGNED: The group ICA analysis showed that the HT and the NC both included 11 intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs), and can be divided into four types of networks: the cortical network (CN), the subcortical network (SN), the default mode network (DMN), and cerebellar networks. CN and SN belongs to sensorimotor network. Compared with NC, the functional network organization of ICNs in the HT was altered and the overall functional intensity was decreased. Furthermore, 13 ROIs were selected in CN, SN, and DMN for further ROI-ROI FC analysis. The ROI-ROI FC analysis showed that passive hyperthermia exposure significantly reduced the FC strength in the overall brain represented by CN, SN, DMN of mice.
UNASSIGNED: Prolonged exposure to high temperature has a greater impact on the overall perception and cognitive level of mice, which might help understand the relationship between neuronal activities and physiological thermal sensation and regulation as well as behavioral changes.

The Myelin Regulator Factor (MYRF) is a master regulator governing myelin formation and maintenance in the central nervous system. The conservation of MYRF across metazoans and its broad tissue expression suggest it has functions extending beyond the well-established role in myelination. Loss of MYRF results in developmental lethality in both invertebrates and vertebrates, and MYRF haploinsufficiency in humans causes MYRF-related Cardiac Urogenital Syndrome, underscoring its importance in animal development; however, these mechanisms are largely unexplored. MYRF, an unconventional transcription factor, begins embedded in the membrane and undergoes intramolecular chaperone mediated trimerization, which triggers self-cleavage, allowing its N-terminal segment with an Ig-fold DNA-binding domain to enter the nucleus for transcriptional regulation. Recent research suggests developmental regulation of cleavage, yet the mechanisms remain enigmatic. While some parts of MYRF\'s structure have been elucidated, others remain obscure, leaving questions about how these motifs are linked to its intricate processing and function.

Monitoring and predicting the regional groundwater storage (GWS) fluctuation is an essential support for effectively managing water resources. Therefore, taking Shandong Province as an example, the data from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) is used to invert GWS fluctuation from January 2003 to December 2022 together with Watergap Global Hydrological Model (WGHM), in-situ groundwater volume and level data. The spatio-temporal characteristics are decomposed using Independent Components Analysis (ICA), and the impact factors, such as precipitation and human activities, which are also analyzed. To predict the short-time changes of GWS, the Support Vector Machines (SVM) is adopted together with three commonly used methods Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA), Auto-Regressive Moving Average Model (ARMA), as the comparison. The results show that: (1) The loss intensity of western GWS is significantly greater than those in coastal areas. From 2003 to 2006, GWS increased sharply; during 2007 to 2014, there exists a loss rate - 5.80 ± 2.28 mm/a of GWS; the linear trend of GWS change is - 5.39 ± 3.65 mm/a from 2015 to 2022, may be mainly due to the effect of South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The correlation coefficient between GRACE and WGHM is 0.67, which is consistent with in-situ groundwater volume and level. (2) The GWS has higher positive correlation with monthly Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) considering time delay after moving average, which has the similar energy spectrum depending on Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) method. In addition, the influencing facotrs on annual GWS fluctuation are analyzed, the correlation coefficient between GWS and in-situ data including the consumption of groundwater mining, farmland irrigation is 0.80, 0.71, respectively. (3) For the GWS prediction, SVM method is adopted to analyze, three training samples with 180, 204 and 228 months are established with the goodness-of-fit all higher than 0.97. The correlation coefficients are 0.56, 0.75, 0.68; RMSE is 5.26, 4.42, 5.65 mm; NSE is 0.28, 0.43, 0.36, respectively. The performance of SVM model is better than the other methods for the short-term prediction.

Ocular artifact has long been viewed as an impediment to the interpretation of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in basic and applied research. Today, the use of blind source separation (BSS) methods, including independent component analysis (ICA) and second-order blind identification (SOBI), is considered an essential step in improving the quality of neural signals. Recently, we introduced a method consisting of SOBI and a discriminant and similarity (DANS)-based identification method, capable of identifying and extracting eye movement-related components. These recovered components can be localized within ocular structures with a high goodness of fit (>95%). This raised the possibility that such EEG-derived SOBI components may be used to build predictive models for tracking gaze position.
As proof of this new concept, we designed an EEG-based virtual eye-tracker (EEG-VET) for tracking eye movement from EEG alone. The EEG-VET is composed of a SOBI algorithm for separating EEG signals into different components, a DANS algorithm for automatically identifying ocular components, and a linear model to transfer ocular components into gaze positions.
The prototype of EEG-VET achieved an accuracy of 0.920° and precision of 1.510° of a visual angle in the best participant, whereas an average accuracy of 1.008° ± 0.357° and a precision of 2.348° ± 0.580° of a visual angle across all participants (N = 18).
This work offers a novel approach that readily co-registers eye movement and neural signals from a single-EEG recording, thus increasing the ease of studying neural mechanisms underlying natural cognition in the context of free eye movement.

Introduction: Periodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease brought on by various bacteria, and effective antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and alveolar bone regeneration are the main goals of treating periodontal disease. Methods: In the current work, we employed Icariin (ICA) into a hydrogel modified with carbon nanofiber (CNF) to create a multifunctional composite nanoplatform. The composite was activated in the near infrared (NIR) to treat periodontitis. Results: The antibacterial results showed that the ICA+CNF@H showed 94.2% and 91.7% clearance of S. aureus and E. coli, respectively, under NIR irradiation. In vitro experiments showed that NIR-irradiated composites suppressed inflammatory factor (IL-6) and ROS expression and up-regulated the performance of anti-inflammatory factor (IL-10) in RAW264.7 cells. At the same time, the composites promoted the production of osteogenic factors in BMSCs, with an approximately 3-fold increase in alkaline phosphatase activity after 7 days and an approximately 2-fold increase in the rate of extracellular matrix mineralization after 21 days. In vivo tests showed that the alveolar bone height was clearly greater in the ICA+CNF@H (NIR) group compared to the periodontitis group. Discussion: In conclusion, ICA+CNF@H under NIR irradiation achieved a synergistic effect of antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, reduction of reactive oxygen species and promotion of osteogenesis, offering a novel approach for treating periodontitis.

Mental fatigue is a common phenomenon in our daily lives. Long-term fatigue can lead to a decline in a person\'s operational functions and seriously affect work efficiency. In this paper, a method that recognizes the degree of mental fatigue based on relative band power and fuzzy entropy of Electroencephalogram (EEG) is proposed. The N-back experiment was used to induce mental fatigue in subjects, and the corresponding EEG signals were recorded during the experiment. A preprocessing method based on complementary ensemble empirical modal decomposition (CEEMD) and independent component analysis (ICA) was designed to remove noise from the raw EEG signal. The relative band power feature, which has been used extensively in fatigue recognition studies, was extracted from the EEG signals. Meanwhile, fuzzy entropy, a feature commonly used in attention recognition, was also extracted for fatigue recognition, based on previous findings that an increase in fatigue is accompanied by a decrease in attention. The two features were fed into an extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier to distinguish three different degrees of fatigue, which resulted in an average accuracy of 92.39% based on data from eight subjects. The promising results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method in mental fatigue degree identification.

This study aimed to investigate the effects and underlying molecular mechanisms of icariin (ICA) and curcumol on autophagy, ferroptosis, and lipid metabolism in prostate cancer (PCa), in vitro and in vivo. Normal prostate epithelial cells RWPE-1 and PCa cell lines DU145 and PC-3 were treated with ICA and curcumol. Ferrostatin-1 (Fer-1) or 3-MA was added to treat DU145 and PC-3 cells. In addition, we knocked down miR-7. The mechanism of ICA and curcumol in PCa cells after the knockdown of miR-7 was verified by in vitro nude mice tumorigenesis experiments. ICA and curcumol had no significant effect on the viability of RWPE-1 cells, but there was a significant difference between DU145 and PC-3 cells. After treatment with ICA and curcumol, the proliferation of PCa cells was inhibited, apoptosis, reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, and miR-7 expression were increased. The combined treatment of ICA and curcumol had a more significant effect. ICA and curcumol treatment induced autophagy and ferroptosis in PCa cells, and si-miR-7 reversed the effects of ICA and curcumol on autophagy and ferroptosis. MiR-7 targeted mTOR and regulated the expression of the mTOR/SREBP1 pathway in PCa cells. ICA and curcumol may affect the lipid metabolism of PCa cells by affecting SREBP1. In addition, the effects and mechanisms of ICA and curcumol on autophagy, ferroptosis, and lipid metabolism in PCa cells were verified in vivo. ICA and curcumol synergistically regulated the miR-7/mTOR/SREBP1 pathway to induce autophagy and ferroptosis in PCa cells and affected lipid metabolism.

Evidence of comparing neural network differences between anxiety disorder subtypes is limited, while it is crucial to reveal the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. The present study aimed to investigate specific and common resting-state functional connectivity (FC) networks in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder (PD), and healthy controls (HC). We employed the gRAICAR algorithm to decompose the resting-state fMRI into independent components and align the components across 61 subjects (22 GAD, 18 PD and 21 HC). The default mode network and precuneus network exhibited GAD-specific aberrance, the anterior default mode network showed atypicality specific to PD, and the right fronto-parietal network showed aberrance common to GAD and PD. Between GAD-specific networks, FC between bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was positively correlated with interoceptive sensitivity. In the common network, altered FCs between DLPFC and angular gyrus, and between orbitofrontal cortex and precuneus, were positively correlated with anxiety severity and interoceptive sensitivity. The pathological mechanism of PD could closely relate to the dysfunction of prefrontal cortex, while GAD could involve more extensive brain areas, which may be related to fear generalization.