Fe(III) complexes have again attracted much attention for application as MRI contrast agents in r... more Fe(III) complexes have again attracted much attention for application as MRI contrast agents in recent years due to their high thermodynamic stability, low long-term toxicity, and large relaxivity at a higher magnetic field. This mini-review covers the recent progress on low-molecular-weight Fe(III) complexes, which have been considered as one of the promising alternatives to clinically used Gd(III)-based contrast agents. Two kinds of complexes including mononuclear Fe(III) complexes and multinuclear Fe(III) complexes are summarized in sequence, with a specific highlight of the structural relationships between the complexes and their relaxivity and thermodynamic stability. In additional, the future perspectives for the design of low-molecular-weight Fe(III) complexes for MRI contrast agents are suggested.
Volume 1: Additive Manufacturing; Advanced Materials Manufacturing; Biomanufacturing; Life Cycle Engineering; Manufacturing Equipment and Automation, 2021
The macro-porous ceramics has promising durability and thermal insulation performances. A cost-ef... more The macro-porous ceramics has promising durability and thermal insulation performances. A cost-effective and scalable additive manufacturing technique for the fabrication of macro-porous ceramics, with a facile approach to control the printed porosity is reported in the paper. Several ceramic inks were prepared, the foaming agent was used to generate gaseous bubbles in the ink, followed by the direct ink writing and the ambient-pressure and room-temperature drying to create the three-dimensional geometries. The experimental studies were performed to optimize the printing quality. A set of studies revealed the optimal printing process parameters for printing the foamed ceramic ink with a high spatial resolution and fine surface quality. Varying the concentration of the foaming agent enabled the controllability of the structural porosity. The maximum porosity can reach 85%, with a crack-free internal porous structure. The tensile tests showed that the printed macro-porous ceramics hav...
Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, 2020
The conventional manufacturing processes for aerogel insulation materials mostly rely on the supe... more The conventional manufacturing processes for aerogel insulation materials mostly rely on the supercritical drying, which suffers from issues of massive energy consumption, high-cost equipment, and prolonged processing time. Considering the large market demand for the aerogel insulation material in the next decade, a cost-effective and scalable fabrication technique is highly desired. In this paper, a direct ink writing (DIW) method is used to three-dimensionally fabricate the silica aerogel insulation material, followed by room-temperature and ambient pressure drying. Compared with the supercritical drying and freeze-drying techniques, the reported method significantly reduces the fabrication time and costs. The cost-effective DIW technique offers the capability to print complex hollow internal structures, coupled with the porous aerogel structure, it is found to be beneficial for the thermal insulation property. The addition of fiber to the ink assures the durability of the fabrica...
This review summarizes the recent advances in H2S detection probes and H2S-activated tumor treatm... more This review summarizes the recent advances in H2S detection probes and H2S-activated tumor treatment agents.
Considerable efforts have been focused on the exploitation of macromolecule ligands for synthesis... more Considerable efforts have been focused on the exploitation of macromolecule ligands for synthesis of magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles as T1 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents, but studies that concern macromolecule ligands with different charges and coordination groups are still limited. Herein, we used poly(acrylic acid) (PAA), poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH), and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), which possess negative, positive and neutral charges with carboxylic acid, amino and hydroxyl groups respectively, as templates and stabilizers to fabricate Fe3O4 nanoparticles through coprecipitation reaction. The obtained Fe3O4-PAA, Fe3O4-PAH, and Fe3O4-PVA nanoparticles showed T1 contrast performance with r1 relaxivities of 23.4, 60.3, and 30.6 mM s−1 at 0.5 T (25 °C), and a r2/r1 ratio of 2.62, 3.82, and 7.26, respectively. The cell viability assay revealed that Fe3O4-PAA and Fe3O4-PVA exhibited good biocompatibility, while Fe3O4-PAH displayed high cytotoxicity. In vivo T1-weigh...
Purpose Online reviews on tourism attractions provide important references for potential tourists... more Purpose Online reviews on tourism attractions provide important references for potential tourists to choose tourism spots. The main goal of this study is conducting sentiment analysis to facilitate users comprehending the large scale of the reviews, based on the comments about Chinese attractions from Japanese tourism website 4Travel. Design/methodology/approach Different statistics- and rule-based methods are used to analyze the sentiment of the reviews. Three groups of novel statistics-based methods combining feature selection functions and the traditional term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method are proposed. We also make seven groups of different rules-based methods. The macro-average and micro-average values for the best classification results of the methods are calculated respectively and the performance of the methods are shown. Findings We compare the statistics-based and rule-based methods separately and compare the overall performance of the two method. Ac...
To optimize the iron oxide nanoparticles as T1-weight contrast for in vivo magnetic resonance ima... more To optimize the iron oxide nanoparticles as T1-weight contrast for in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), numbers of macromolecule ligands have been explored with considerable effort. However, reports refer to the comparison of the T1-weight contrast performances of iron oxide nanoparticles modified with natural and artificial macromolecule ligands are still limited. In this work, we used a typical natural protein macromolecule (bovine serum albumin, BSA) and an artificial macromolecule (poly(acrylic acid)-poly(methacrylic acid), PMAA-PTTM) as surface ligands to fabricate Fe3O4-BSA and Fe3O4-PMAA-PTTM nanoparticles with similar size and magnetization by the coprecipitation method and compared their MRI performances. In vitro and in vivo experiments revealed that Fe3O4-BSA with lower cytotoxicity exhibited higher r2/r1 ratio in solution and darkening contrast enhancement for liver and kidney sites of mice under T1-weight imaging, while Fe3O4-PMAA-PTTM displayed much lower r2/r1 ra...
This study aims at constructing a microblog influence prediction model and revealing how the user... more This study aims at constructing a microblog influence prediction model and revealing how the user, time, and content features of microblog entries about public health emergencies affect the influence of microblog entries. Microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak are selected as data sets. The BM25 latent Dirichlet allocation model (LDA-BM25) is used to extract topics from the microblog entries. A microblog influence prediction model is proposed by using the random forest method. Results reveal that the proposed model can predict the influence of microblog entries about public health emergencies with a precision rate reaching 88.8%. The individual features that play a role in the influence of microblog entries, as well as their influence tendencies are also analyzed. The proposed microblog influence prediction model consists of user, time, and content features. It makes up the deficiency that content features are often ignored by other microblog influence prediction models. The rol...
The statistical independence between the distributions of different chromophores in tissue has pr... more The statistical independence between the distributions of different chromophores in tissue has previously been used for linear unmixing with independent component analysis (ICA). In this study, we propose exploiting this statistical property in a nonlinear model-based inversion method. The aim is to reduce the sensitivity of the inversion scheme to errors in the modelling of the fluence, and hence provide more accurate quantification of the concentration of independent chromophores. A gradient-based optimisation algorithm is used to minimise the error functional, which includes a term representing the mutual information between the chromophores in addition to the standard least-squares data error. Both numerical simulations and an experimental phantom study are conducted to demonstrate that, in the presence of experimental errors in the fluence model, the proposed inversion method results in more accurate estimation of the concentrations of independent chromophores compared to the s...
Over the past few decades, the synthetic development of ultra-small nanoparticles has become an i... more Over the past few decades, the synthetic development of ultra-small nanoparticles has become an important strategy in nano-medicine, where smaller-sized nanoparticles are known to be more easily excreted from the body, greatly reducing the risk caused by introducing nano-theranostic agents. Gold nanorods are one of the most important nano-theranostic agents because of their special optical and electronic properties. However, the large size (diameter > 6 nm) of most obtained gold nanorods limits their clinical application. In recent years, more and more researchers have begun to investigate the synthesis and application of small gold nanorods (diameter < 6 nm), which exhibit similar optical and electronic properties as larger gold nanorods. In this review, we summarize the recent advances of synthesis of the small gold nanorods and their application for near-infrared light-mediated bio-imaging and cancer therapy.
Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany), Jan 10, 2017
Water soluble polymer nanoparticles (NP-1 and NP-2) were prepared by three-component self-assembl... more Water soluble polymer nanoparticles (NP-1 and NP-2) were prepared by three-component self-assembly of iridium complex, poly(4-vinyl pyridine-b-ethylene oxide) (P4VP-b-PEO), and methane sulfonic acid (MSA). Due to the unique metal-ligand charge transfer transition property and heavy atom effect of iridium, NP-1 and NP-2 showed bright phosphorescence and generated singlet oxygen (1O2) effectively under visible light irradiation (λ > 400 nm) with a power density of 300 mW/cm2. NP-2, an example of polymer nanoparticles, showed minimal cytotoxic activity in the dark. The laser confocal fluorescence and flow cytometry microscopy experiments demonstrated that NP-2 could be uptaken by a model cancer cell line of 4T1 cells, which should be used as a phosphorescent probe for cell imaging preferentially staining the cytoplasm. After 6 h of incubation with NP-2 (100 μg mL-1), the cell viability of 4T1 cells decreased to ~10 % upon the vislible light irradiation (λ > 400 nm, 300 mW/cm2) on...
Nitric oxide (NO) plays a key role in various physiological and pathological processes. It is of ... more Nitric oxide (NO) plays a key role in various physiological and pathological processes. It is of great significance in developing a platform that enables exogenous delivery of NO spatiotemporally to a targeted site for realizing NO-mediated therapy. We report herein a stable, multifunctional NO-delivery nanoplatform that is capable of target directing, fluorescence tracking, and light-controlled NO delivery. A ruthenium nitrosyl [Ru(TPY(COOH))(o-phenylenediamine)(NO)](PF6)3 and a target-directing molecule of folic acid (FA) were covalently grafted onto the surface of a carrier of carbon dots (CDs), forming a {Ru-NO@FA@CDs} nanoplatform. This nanoplatform is fluorescence self-trackable in a cellular environment and can recognize specific cancer cells via FA-folate receptor binding; it was selectively taken up by cancer cells to enter the cytosol, in which localized NO was produced on demand by adept control of visible light illumination. This offered the potential for treating diseas...
Fe(III) complexes have again attracted much attention for application as MRI contrast agents in r... more Fe(III) complexes have again attracted much attention for application as MRI contrast agents in recent years due to their high thermodynamic stability, low long-term toxicity, and large relaxivity at a higher magnetic field. This mini-review covers the recent progress on low-molecular-weight Fe(III) complexes, which have been considered as one of the promising alternatives to clinically used Gd(III)-based contrast agents. Two kinds of complexes including mononuclear Fe(III) complexes and multinuclear Fe(III) complexes are summarized in sequence, with a specific highlight of the structural relationships between the complexes and their relaxivity and thermodynamic stability. In additional, the future perspectives for the design of low-molecular-weight Fe(III) complexes for MRI contrast agents are suggested.
Volume 1: Additive Manufacturing; Advanced Materials Manufacturing; Biomanufacturing; Life Cycle Engineering; Manufacturing Equipment and Automation, 2021
The macro-porous ceramics has promising durability and thermal insulation performances. A cost-ef... more The macro-porous ceramics has promising durability and thermal insulation performances. A cost-effective and scalable additive manufacturing technique for the fabrication of macro-porous ceramics, with a facile approach to control the printed porosity is reported in the paper. Several ceramic inks were prepared, the foaming agent was used to generate gaseous bubbles in the ink, followed by the direct ink writing and the ambient-pressure and room-temperature drying to create the three-dimensional geometries. The experimental studies were performed to optimize the printing quality. A set of studies revealed the optimal printing process parameters for printing the foamed ceramic ink with a high spatial resolution and fine surface quality. Varying the concentration of the foaming agent enabled the controllability of the structural porosity. The maximum porosity can reach 85%, with a crack-free internal porous structure. The tensile tests showed that the printed macro-porous ceramics hav...
Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, 2020
The conventional manufacturing processes for aerogel insulation materials mostly rely on the supe... more The conventional manufacturing processes for aerogel insulation materials mostly rely on the supercritical drying, which suffers from issues of massive energy consumption, high-cost equipment, and prolonged processing time. Considering the large market demand for the aerogel insulation material in the next decade, a cost-effective and scalable fabrication technique is highly desired. In this paper, a direct ink writing (DIW) method is used to three-dimensionally fabricate the silica aerogel insulation material, followed by room-temperature and ambient pressure drying. Compared with the supercritical drying and freeze-drying techniques, the reported method significantly reduces the fabrication time and costs. The cost-effective DIW technique offers the capability to print complex hollow internal structures, coupled with the porous aerogel structure, it is found to be beneficial for the thermal insulation property. The addition of fiber to the ink assures the durability of the fabrica...
This review summarizes the recent advances in H2S detection probes and H2S-activated tumor treatm... more This review summarizes the recent advances in H2S detection probes and H2S-activated tumor treatment agents.
Considerable efforts have been focused on the exploitation of macromolecule ligands for synthesis... more Considerable efforts have been focused on the exploitation of macromolecule ligands for synthesis of magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles as T1 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents, but studies that concern macromolecule ligands with different charges and coordination groups are still limited. Herein, we used poly(acrylic acid) (PAA), poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH), and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), which possess negative, positive and neutral charges with carboxylic acid, amino and hydroxyl groups respectively, as templates and stabilizers to fabricate Fe3O4 nanoparticles through coprecipitation reaction. The obtained Fe3O4-PAA, Fe3O4-PAH, and Fe3O4-PVA nanoparticles showed T1 contrast performance with r1 relaxivities of 23.4, 60.3, and 30.6 mM s−1 at 0.5 T (25 °C), and a r2/r1 ratio of 2.62, 3.82, and 7.26, respectively. The cell viability assay revealed that Fe3O4-PAA and Fe3O4-PVA exhibited good biocompatibility, while Fe3O4-PAH displayed high cytotoxicity. In vivo T1-weigh...
Purpose Online reviews on tourism attractions provide important references for potential tourists... more Purpose Online reviews on tourism attractions provide important references for potential tourists to choose tourism spots. The main goal of this study is conducting sentiment analysis to facilitate users comprehending the large scale of the reviews, based on the comments about Chinese attractions from Japanese tourism website 4Travel. Design/methodology/approach Different statistics- and rule-based methods are used to analyze the sentiment of the reviews. Three groups of novel statistics-based methods combining feature selection functions and the traditional term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method are proposed. We also make seven groups of different rules-based methods. The macro-average and micro-average values for the best classification results of the methods are calculated respectively and the performance of the methods are shown. Findings We compare the statistics-based and rule-based methods separately and compare the overall performance of the two method. Ac...
To optimize the iron oxide nanoparticles as T1-weight contrast for in vivo magnetic resonance ima... more To optimize the iron oxide nanoparticles as T1-weight contrast for in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), numbers of macromolecule ligands have been explored with considerable effort. However, reports refer to the comparison of the T1-weight contrast performances of iron oxide nanoparticles modified with natural and artificial macromolecule ligands are still limited. In this work, we used a typical natural protein macromolecule (bovine serum albumin, BSA) and an artificial macromolecule (poly(acrylic acid)-poly(methacrylic acid), PMAA-PTTM) as surface ligands to fabricate Fe3O4-BSA and Fe3O4-PMAA-PTTM nanoparticles with similar size and magnetization by the coprecipitation method and compared their MRI performances. In vitro and in vivo experiments revealed that Fe3O4-BSA with lower cytotoxicity exhibited higher r2/r1 ratio in solution and darkening contrast enhancement for liver and kidney sites of mice under T1-weight imaging, while Fe3O4-PMAA-PTTM displayed much lower r2/r1 ra...
This study aims at constructing a microblog influence prediction model and revealing how the user... more This study aims at constructing a microblog influence prediction model and revealing how the user, time, and content features of microblog entries about public health emergencies affect the influence of microblog entries. Microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak are selected as data sets. The BM25 latent Dirichlet allocation model (LDA-BM25) is used to extract topics from the microblog entries. A microblog influence prediction model is proposed by using the random forest method. Results reveal that the proposed model can predict the influence of microblog entries about public health emergencies with a precision rate reaching 88.8%. The individual features that play a role in the influence of microblog entries, as well as their influence tendencies are also analyzed. The proposed microblog influence prediction model consists of user, time, and content features. It makes up the deficiency that content features are often ignored by other microblog influence prediction models. The rol...
The statistical independence between the distributions of different chromophores in tissue has pr... more The statistical independence between the distributions of different chromophores in tissue has previously been used for linear unmixing with independent component analysis (ICA). In this study, we propose exploiting this statistical property in a nonlinear model-based inversion method. The aim is to reduce the sensitivity of the inversion scheme to errors in the modelling of the fluence, and hence provide more accurate quantification of the concentration of independent chromophores. A gradient-based optimisation algorithm is used to minimise the error functional, which includes a term representing the mutual information between the chromophores in addition to the standard least-squares data error. Both numerical simulations and an experimental phantom study are conducted to demonstrate that, in the presence of experimental errors in the fluence model, the proposed inversion method results in more accurate estimation of the concentrations of independent chromophores compared to the s...
Over the past few decades, the synthetic development of ultra-small nanoparticles has become an i... more Over the past few decades, the synthetic development of ultra-small nanoparticles has become an important strategy in nano-medicine, where smaller-sized nanoparticles are known to be more easily excreted from the body, greatly reducing the risk caused by introducing nano-theranostic agents. Gold nanorods are one of the most important nano-theranostic agents because of their special optical and electronic properties. However, the large size (diameter > 6 nm) of most obtained gold nanorods limits their clinical application. In recent years, more and more researchers have begun to investigate the synthesis and application of small gold nanorods (diameter < 6 nm), which exhibit similar optical and electronic properties as larger gold nanorods. In this review, we summarize the recent advances of synthesis of the small gold nanorods and their application for near-infrared light-mediated bio-imaging and cancer therapy.
Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany), Jan 10, 2017
Water soluble polymer nanoparticles (NP-1 and NP-2) were prepared by three-component self-assembl... more Water soluble polymer nanoparticles (NP-1 and NP-2) were prepared by three-component self-assembly of iridium complex, poly(4-vinyl pyridine-b-ethylene oxide) (P4VP-b-PEO), and methane sulfonic acid (MSA). Due to the unique metal-ligand charge transfer transition property and heavy atom effect of iridium, NP-1 and NP-2 showed bright phosphorescence and generated singlet oxygen (1O2) effectively under visible light irradiation (λ > 400 nm) with a power density of 300 mW/cm2. NP-2, an example of polymer nanoparticles, showed minimal cytotoxic activity in the dark. The laser confocal fluorescence and flow cytometry microscopy experiments demonstrated that NP-2 could be uptaken by a model cancer cell line of 4T1 cells, which should be used as a phosphorescent probe for cell imaging preferentially staining the cytoplasm. After 6 h of incubation with NP-2 (100 μg mL-1), the cell viability of 4T1 cells decreased to ~10 % upon the vislible light irradiation (λ > 400 nm, 300 mW/cm2) on...
Nitric oxide (NO) plays a key role in various physiological and pathological processes. It is of ... more Nitric oxide (NO) plays a key role in various physiological and pathological processes. It is of great significance in developing a platform that enables exogenous delivery of NO spatiotemporally to a targeted site for realizing NO-mediated therapy. We report herein a stable, multifunctional NO-delivery nanoplatform that is capable of target directing, fluorescence tracking, and light-controlled NO delivery. A ruthenium nitrosyl [Ru(TPY(COOH))(o-phenylenediamine)(NO)](PF6)3 and a target-directing molecule of folic acid (FA) were covalently grafted onto the surface of a carrier of carbon dots (CDs), forming a {Ru-NO@FA@CDs} nanoplatform. This nanoplatform is fluorescence self-trackable in a cellular environment and can recognize specific cancer cells via FA-folate receptor binding; it was selectively taken up by cancer cells to enter the cytosol, in which localized NO was produced on demand by adept control of visible light illumination. This offered the potential for treating diseas...
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