Ruihan Zhang^1,2, Junhao Yang¹, Chunxiao Chen^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 177-187, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.04292

Abstract The proportion of cells staining for the nuclear antigen Ki-67 is an important predictive indicator for assessment of tumor cell proliferation and growth in routine pathological investigation. Instead of traditional scoring methods based on the experience of a trained laboratory scientist, deep learning approach can be automatically used to analyze the expression of Ki-67 as well. Deep learning based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) for image classification and single shot multibox detector (SSD) for object detection are used to investigate the expression of Ki-67 for assessment of biopsies from patients with breast cancer in this More >

Ying Mao¹, Chaojing Li¹, Peng Ge¹, Fujun Wang^1,*, Lu Wang^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 143-154, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.03987

Abstract Heparin/ PEG-PCL core-shell microcarriers were fabricated in one-step via coaxial-electrospraying technology. Optimization of the coaxial-electrospraying processing is by controlling the PEG-PCL concentration, applied voltage, receiving distance, and feed rate. The influence of the electrospray parameters on microsphere morphology was studied by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The functional groups and components of the electrosprayed microspheres were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Transmission electron microscope (TEM) observation proved the core-shell structure of heparin-loaded PEG-PCL microspheres. Drug loading and releasing study demonstrated that PEG-PCL concentration could control the encapsulation efficiency and releasing activity of More >

Solenne Mondésert-Deveraux^{1, *}, Rachele Allena², Denis Aubry¹

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 155-176, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.03053

Abstract Cell migration is the cornerstone of many biological phenomena such as cancer metastasis, immune response or organogenesis. Adhesion-based motility is the most renown and examined motility mode, but in an adhesion-free confined environment or simply to achieve a higher migration speed, cells can adopt a very interesting bleb-based migration mode called “chimneying”. This mode rests on the sharp synchronization between the active contraction of the cells uropod and the passive friction force between the cell and the confining surface. In this paper, we propose a one dimensional poroelastic model of chimneying which considers the active… More >

JongWon Kim^1,2, Ning Li², Ramana Pidaparti^2,*, Xianqiao Wang^2,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 127-141, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.02669

Abstract Nonlinear microstructure of the microtubules (MTs) plays an important role in their mechanical properties. Despite the extensive efforts into the development of continuum models for microtubules, a mesoscale finite element model that can link the molecular level information to the overall performance of microtubules is still missing. The aim of this study is to develop a molecular dynamics model (MDM), finite element model (FEM) and structural mechanics beam model (SMBM) for tubulins of protofilament (PF). In MDM, the backbone atoms of α-tubulin were fixed while the backbone atoms of β-tubulin were attached to a molecular… More >

Yuxiang Huang¹, Chuliu He¹, Jiaqiu Wang², Yuehong Miao¹, Tongjin Zhu¹, Ping Zhou¹, Zhiyong Li^1,2,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 117-125, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.02478

Abstract Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) is becoming more and more popular in clinical diagnosis of coronary atherosclerotic. However, reading IVOCT images is of large amount of work. This article describes a method based on image feature extraction and support vector machine (SVM) to achieve semi-automatic segmentation of IVOCT images. The image features utilized in this work including light attenuation coefficients and image textures based on gray level co-occurrence matrix. Different sets of hyper-parameters and image features were tested. This method achieved an accuracy of 83% on the test images. Single class accuracy of 89% for More >

Zhedian Zhou¹, Tal Geva², Rahul H. Rathod², Alexander Tang², Chun Yang³, Kristen L. Billiar⁴, Dalin Tang^1,*,3, Pedro del Nido⁵

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 99-115, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.00558

Abstract Patients with repaired Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF), a congenital heart defect which includes a ventricular septal defect and severe right ventricular outflow obstruction, account for the majority of cases with late onset right ventricle (RV) failure. The current surgical approach, which includes pulmonary valve replacement/insertion (PVR), has yielded mixed results. A computational parametric study using 7 patient-specific RV/LV models based on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) data as "virtual surgery" was performed to investigate the impact of patch size, RV remodeling and tissue regeneration in PVR surgery design on RV cardiac functions. Two patch sizes, three… More >

Lilan Gao^1,2,*, Qingxian Yuan^1,2, Ruixin Li^3,*, Lei Chen^1,2, Chunqiu Zhang^1,2, Xizheng Zhang^1,2

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 85-98, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.00329

Abstract Silk fibroin-typeⅡcollagen scaffold was made by 3D printing technique and freeze-drying method, and its mechanical properties were studied by experiments and theoretical prediction. The results show that the three-dimensional silk fibroin-typeⅡ collagen scaffold has good porosity and water absorption, which is (89.3%+3.26%) and (824.09%+93.05%), respectively. With the given strain value, the stress of scaffold decreases rapidly firstly and then tends to be stable during the stress relaxation. Both initial and instantaneous stresses increase with increase of applied strain value. The creep strains of scaffold with different stress levels show the two stages: the rapidly increasing… More >

Ranu Gupta^1,3,*, Rahul Pachauri^2,3, Ashutosh Kumar Singh^1,4

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 63-83, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.00114

Abstract Various chaos-based image encryption schemes have been proposed in last few years. The proposed image encryption method uses chaotic map. The encryption is done by using 256 bit long external secret key. The initial condition for the chaotic mapping is evaluated by the use of external secret key along with the mapping function. Besides that, the proposed method is made more robust by applying multiple operations to the pixels of the image depending on the outcome of the calculation of the logistic map. Moreover, block shuffling of the image and modifying the secret key after More >

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.1, pp. 51-61, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.015.051

Abstract Tracheal stenosis is a common respiratory disease and is usually treated by stent implantation. However, the implanted stent often causes excessive hyperplasia of trachea granulation tissue, leading to the restenosis. Although surgical removal or chemical suppression can be used to alleviate the restenosis, the efficacy is limited. Thus, restenosis remains a thorny complication. We investigated this issue from the perspective of the “tress-growth”relationship. Firstly, the lower airway of 5 experimental dogs were CT-scanned to reconstruct the 3D numerical models; secondly, the implantations of the Nitinol alloy stents were numerically simulated; thirdly, 45 days after the… More >

Jiangguo Lin¹, Botao Xiao^1,2, Quhuan Li¹, Ying Fang¹, Jianhua Wu^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.1, pp. 37-49, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.015.037

Abstract The protein structure-function paradigm implies that the structure of a protein defines its function. Crystallization techniques such as X-ray, electron microscopy (EM) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have been applied to resolve the crystal structure of numerous proteins, provided beautiful and informative models of proteins. However, proteins are not intrinsically in static state but in dynamic state, which is lack in crystal models. The protein flexibility, a key mechanical property of proteins, plays important roles in various biological processes, such as ligand-receptor interaction, signaling transduction, substrate recognition and post-translational modifications. Advanced time-resolved crystallography has been More >