ALBERT

Description: Surpervoxels are becoming increasingly popular in many point cloud processing applications. However, few methods have been devised specifically for generating compact supervoxels from unstructured three-dimensional (3D) point clouds. In this study, we aimed to generate high quality over-segmentation of point clouds. We propose a merge-swap optimization framework that solves any supervoxel generation problem formulated in energy minimization. In particular, we tailored an energy function that explicitly encourages regular and compact supervoxels with adaptive size control considering local geometric information of point clouds. We also provide two acceleration techniques to reduce the computational overhead. The performance of the proposed merge-swap optimization approach is superior to that of previous work in terms of thorough optimization, computational efficiency, and practical applicability to incorporating control of other properties of supervoxels. The experiments show that our approach produces supervoxels with better segmentation quality than two state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets.

Description: This study aims to accurately simulate the outfield low-temperature environment for the key components of aircraft in the parking state, using the infield low-temperature environmental test chamber, when there is a difference between the infield and outfield environments; and, moreover, reveal the similarity between the influences of the infield and outfield low-temperature environments on the elastic properties of the rubber sealing materials for aircraft. Two kinds of rubber materials were examined in the infield and outfield—the tensile springback test and the isobaric elongation test—and the measured data of low-temperature steady-state response (elastic property) were obtained under the typical temperature of −40 to 10 °C, finding that there is difference of elastic property between the infield and outfield environment. Three fitting methods were then used to describe the relationship between elasticity and temperature. In view of the difference of the elastic response of the typical rubber sealing materials to the low-temperature infield and outfield, a similarity calculation method of infield and outfield low-temperature tests was proposed, based on the translation and scaling transformation of the similarity curve. The outfield test data verify that the method proposed has high goodness of fit, and it is feasible and generalizable in the low-temperature performance testing and research of rubber materials and components.

Description: Autophagic/lysosomal dysfunction is a critical pathogenesis of neuronal injury after ischemic stroke. Trehalose has been validated to restore the impaired autophagy flux by boosting transcription factor EB (TFEB) nuclear translocation, but orally administrated trehalose can be greatly digested by intestinal trehalase before entering into brain. Melibiose (MEL), an analogue of trehalose, may thoroughly exert its pharmacological effects through oral administration due to absence of intestinal melibiase. The present study was to investigate whether melibiose could also confer a neuroprotection by the similar pharmacological mechanism as trehalose did after ischemic stroke. The rats were pretreated with melibiose for 7 days before middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) surgery. Twenty-four hours following MCAO/reperfusion, the cytoplasmic and nuclear TFEB, and the proteins in autophagic/lysosomal pathway at the penumbra were detected by western blot and immunofluorescence, respectively. Meanwhile, the neurological deficit, neuron survival, and infarct volume were assessed to evaluate the therapeutic outcomes. The results showed that the neurological injury was significantly mitigated in MCAO+MEL group, compared with that in MCAO group. Meanwhile, nuclear TFEB expression in neurons at the penumbra was significantly promoted by melibiose. Moreover, melibiose treatment markedly enhanced autophagy flux, as reflected by the reinforced lysosomal capacity and reduced autophagic substrates. Furthermore, the melibiose-elicited neuroprotection was prominently counteracted by lysosomal inhibitor Bafilomycin A1 (Baf-A1). Contrarily, reinforcement of lysosomal capacity with EN6 further improved the neurological performance upon melibiose treatment. Our data suggests that melibiose-augmented neuroprotection may be achieved by ameliorating autophagy flux via facilitation of TFEB nuclear translocation in neurons after ischemic stroke.