Women's reproductive and endocrine disorders including Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, thyroid disorders, infertility, and pregnancy-related complications remain a major global health burden. These conditions are especially difficult to manage in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where diagnostic facilities and specialist care are limited. We conducted a PRISMA-ScR-guided scoping review of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications in women's reproductive and hormonal health. Our search covered five databases PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, and Google Scholar and included peer-reviewed studies published between 2021 and 2025. A total of 116 eligible studies were identified and classified into six categories: clinical prediction and risk modeling, medical imaging and AI, biomarker discovery and multi-omics, reproductive and endocrine health applications, clinical decision support systems, and AI/ML methodology development. Ensemble methods such as Random Forest and Gradient Boosting showed strong and consistent diagnostic performance. Convolutional neural networks performed well in single-centre settings but showed reduced performance upon external validation, consistent with optimism bias. Overall, 83.6% of studies were classified as high risk of bias and 75.5% lacked external validation. After adjusting for population size, high-income countries produced 23 times more studies per million women of reproductive age than LMICs. Sub-Saharan Africa contributed fewer than 0.1 studies per million women, and no studies were identified from Nepal or Sri Lanka. Current evidence, which is heavily concentrated in high-income and East Asian settings, is insufficient to support population-level deployment. We introduce a four-tier LMIC feasibility classification system that links data modality, infrastructure requirements, and personnel needs. We also propose a phased research agenda that separates near-term priorities (0-2 years) from medium-term goals that depend on infrastructure investment.

Cananguchales, forested wetlands dominated by Mauritia flexuosa, are strategic ecosystems in the Amazonian foothills due to their contribution to ecosystem goods and services. However, their high vulnerability to climate variability and the progressive degradation caused by the global crisis demand new tools for their valuation and sustainable management. This study evaluated the ecological sustainability of Cananguchales through emergy indicators that allow biocountable monitoring of the efficiency and performance of their ecological wealth. Indicators of Ecological Loading, Sustainable Emergy, Investment, Yield, and Renewability were applied within a non-experimental design using a quantitative, applied, and deductive-projective approach. Using ecological data and energy flow equations, values were estimated in joules, later transformed into solar emergy joules and emergy-based US dollars using standardized factors. The results showed a high proportion of renewable energy inputs (>99%) over five consecutive years, demonstrating high energy efficiency and ecological stability. A unified biocountable structure was established for these wetlands. The emergy indicators applied here are established tools; the contribution of the study lies at the level of accounting recognition, namely the integration of emergy synthesis into a formal double-entry biocountable structure in which ecological flows are recognised as debit assets and credit liabilities and closed into an ecological equity balance. It is concluded that this accounting-recognition structure provides an operational route for objectively valuing strategic ecosystems and guiding decisions towards their conservation and sustainability in the Amazonian context.

Overflow weir fishways represent a basic type of pool-and-weir fishway structure. To investigate its hydraulic characteristics, this study conducts numerical simulations to obtain the flow field in a typical pool chamber. A total of nine cases are designed by varying the inlet discharge and pool depth, and the flow patterns, velocity distribution, turbulent kinetic energy, and dissipation rate are systematically analyzed. Three flow regimes are identified: plunging flow, streaming flow, and transition flow. The variation laws of these regimes with inlet discharge and pool depth are obtained. The distributions and evolution characteristics of velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and dissipation rate are also summarized. The results show that the flow regime is jointly controlled by inflow discharge and vertical drop between adjacent pools. With the increase of inflow discharge, the flow regime shifts from plunging flow to transition flow and then to streaming flow. Under the same inflow discharge, a larger vertical drop tends to form plunging flow with lower turbulence intensity. This study reveals the fundamental hydraulic characteristics of overflow weir fishways and provides a reference for the structural design and hydraulic optimization of such fishways.

Coral reefs face significant threats due to climate change and human activities, which require innovative approaches to study and protect these ecosystems. Successful settlement is the bottleneck linking a reef's free-swimming larvae to the benthic community, ultimately determining the next generation of corals and the long-term resilience of the entire ecosystem. This work introduces an agent-based model (ABM) driven by neuroevolution (NE) to simulate coral larval settlement behavior under various environmental conditions. Inspired by biological processes, the model combines sensory input with a neural network (NN) to guide larval actions, optimizing settlement success through evolutionary algorithms. The model replicates three experimental setups from previous studies, validating it against key metrics such as settlement success, vertical distribution, and orientation to environmental cues. The evolved controllers capture the characteristic cue responses of each experiment: crustose coralline algae (CCA)-driven settlement, the bimodal vertical distribution, and orientation towards reef sound, while also exposing the limits of the simplified environment, as its reduced hydrodynamics. Sensitivity analyses further indicate that these behaviors are driven by different mechanisms across the experiments, illustrating how the model yields interpretable, testable outcomes. This approach provides a basis for integrating adaptive behaviors into coral larval simulations, and future work will focus on refining the model to enhance biological realism and scalability.

Automatic transcription of braille documents remains challenging in document digitization settings, particularly under real imaging degradations such as uneven embossing, illumination variation, paper texture, skew, blur, and ghosting, which make braille dot presence uncertain and often cause error propagation from dot detection to cell encoding and final text transcription. To address this problem, we propose an uncertainty-aware structured decoding framework for Chinese braille document transcription that formulates the task as document analysis with an explicit intermediate representation rather than as a purely end-to-end black-box mapping. The method first performs robust grid fitting and structured dot analysis within braille candidate regions, and converts dot responses into calibrated probabilities. Topological consistency constraints are then imposed to recover valid six-dot cell patterns while producing dot-level and cell-level confidence estimates for risk localization. To resolve residual ambiguity efficiently, only low-confidence cells are expanded into small local candidate sets, which are rescored using contextual compatibility and local structural cost. Experiments on authentic scanned and photographed braille documents using document-level five-fold cross-validation achieved a Dot-F1 of 0.992 ± 0.002, a character error rate of 0.018 ± 0.003, and a BLEU-4 score of 74.1 ± 1.2. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves structural recovery stability, transcription accuracy, and sentence-level consistency, while maintaining strong robustness across document conditions and limiting additional inference overhead.

Previous studies have suggested that aldosterone is potentially involved in the development of motion sickness and that atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) may inhibit it. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the inhibitory effects of ANP on aldosterone activity in motion sickness and on aldosterone-induced changes in endolymph volume in the inner ear. We found that rotatory stimulation induced an elevation in plasma aldosterone levels, intraperitoneal aldosterone injection caused motion sickness-like responses in both guinea pigs and mice, and ANP inhibited these responses. Moreover, aldosterone injection induced an increase in inner ear endolymph volume in guinea pigs, whereas ANP alleviated this endolymph expansion. In addition, mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) expression was increased in the inner ear tissues after rotatory stimulation and aldosterone injection, and in cultured vestibular epithelial cells after aldosterone treatment, whereas ANP reduced MR expression. In cultured vestibular epithelial cells, ANP reduced the aldosterone-induced nuclear distribution of MR, as well as the expression of ENaC and Na+-K+-ATPase and the membrane distribution of Na+-K+-ATPase. Furthermore, ANP inhibited the aldosterone-induced increase in the intracellular K+ concentration in cells incubated with a simulated endolymph fluid, and the increase in intracellular Na+ concentration in cells incubated with an extracellular solution. In conclusion, the present results suggest that ANP may play an anti-motion sickness role by reducing the plasma aldosterone levels and inhibiting aldosterone-induced endolymph expansion by downregulating downstream target protein expression and activities, thereby altering the resultant ion concentrations in the inner ear epithelial cells.

The aim of the current research project is to evaluate the potential cytotoxicity of the aqueous extract of Artemisia -albaherba aerial parts against selected cancer cell lines. The widely grown plant material was collected and extracted. The crude aqueous extract was subjected to MTT analysis to assess potential cytotoxicity and cell viability. The cell lines utilized include: Normal Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial cell line EA (HUVEC; cat. no. CRL-1730; ATCC), Triple Negative Breast cancer cell line, MDA MB 231 (HTB-26), Human Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma cell line PANC1 (CRL-1469), Human Colorectal Carcinoma HCT 116 (CCL-247) cell lines. Cisplatin and doxorubicin serve as reference agents, and the media vehicle serves as a negative control. The extract was analysed by UHPLC/MS-MS. Three of the detected bioactive phytoconstituents, namely liquiritigenin, isofraxidin, and artemisinin, were docked against three cancer-associated protein targets corresponding to the three investigated cancer cell lines. The selected targets were TP53/p53 in the HCT-116 colorectal cancer cell line, AKT1 in the MDA cell line, and KRAS in the PANC-1 pancreatic cancer cell line. A marked decrease in cell viability was observed in the human colon and breast cancer cell lines at plant extract concentrations of 0.046-50 mg/mL. The highest cytotoxicity, around 45%, was observed against human colon cancer cells at concentrations of 12.5-50 mg/mL. And the cytotoxicity was around 40% against breast cancer cells at a concentration of 50 mg/mL. The plant remedy exhibited moderate cytotoxicity against pancreatic cancer cells, with an IC50 of approximately 20% at the highest tested concentration. The biocompatibility of the aqueous extract was predicted; hence, normal epithelial cells retained their viability at 1.5 mg/mL and showed a moderate-to-weak effect at higher concentrations. The herbal extract exhibits the highest IC50 values against EA and PANC1 of 220-240 µg/mL, whereas against MDA-MB-231 and HCT-116 cells, the IC50 values are significantly lower at 80-100 µg/mL. This indicates greater sensitivity of breast and colon cancer cell lines to the natural product. The simulation analyses demonstrate that isofraxidin and liquiritigenin have better binding affinity to the selected proteins than artemisinin. The best overall complexes were TP53-isofraxidin and TP53-liquiritigenin, with docking scores around -8 kcal/mol, followed by KRAS-liquiritigenin and AKT1-isofraxidin. To sum up, A. herb alba has a potential selective anticancer effect that may be attributed to the phenolic compounds constituents. These promising findings warrant further study to elucidate its mechanism of action, safety profile, and to predict the optimal dosage formulation.

Whether abnormal returns around different pharmaceutical policy events exhibit similar patterns, and whether these patterns vary across industry-index levels, return scales, and event windows, has received limited comparative examination within a unified analytical framework. This study examines six pharmaceutical policy events in China using the Shenwan first-level Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Index and six Shenwan second-level pharmaceutical sub-sector indices, with the CSI 300 Index as the market benchmark. Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) is used to reconstruct returns at multiple scales, and an event-study framework is applied to estimate abnormal returns (ARs) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs). The results show that, within the events, industry indices, and event windows examined, policy objectives or policy-instrument attributes do not exhibit a consistent correspondence with observed abnormal-return patterns. Medium-frequency CARs were generally negative for both centralized procurement events, but centralized drug procurement showed broader negative accumulation across sub-sectors, whereas centralized procurement of high-value medical consumables showed greater sectoral differentiation. Although the clinical trial data self-inspection and verification event and the reform of the drug review and approval system both involved drug R&D and registration regulation, their abnormal-return patterns differed markedly, with the latter showing broadly positive medium-frequency CARs. The aggregate industry index may not fully capture underlying differences when sub-sector responses diverge substantially, and high- and medium-frequency CARs also differ in direction for some events and sub-sectors. In addition, the cumulative direction of CARs over wider event windows may differ from the trajectory of daily ARs following the policy announcement. Overall, generalizations based on policy categories, an aggregate industry index, or a single event window may overlook important differences in abnormal returns across industry-index levels, return scales, and temporal paths.

This work provides a detailed and reproducible methodology for the fabrication of copper-doped hydroxyapatite (HAp-Cu) thin films on silicon substrates via Plasma-Assisted Pulsed Laser Deposition (PAPLD). The methodology is centered on the nanosecond pulsed laser ablation of a synthetic hydroxyapatite (HAp) target, physically modified through the incorporation of metallic copper filaments, which serve as a localized dopant source during the deposition process. This configuration enables the controlled co-deposition of hydroxyapatite and copper species, facilitating the formation of uniform thin films with potential bioactive properties. The proposed protocol comprises the following key elements: • Preparation of Targets: A comprehensive, stepwise procedure for the synthesis of hydroxyapatite powder and the subsequent fabrication of mechanically robust ceramic targets, including a novel approach for embedding copper filaments to ensure effective doping during laser ablation. • Deposition Parameters: Detailed specifications of the PAPLD system, encompassing laser characteristics (wavelength, fluence, repetition rate), target-to-substrate distance, and chamber vacuum conditions. These parameters have been optimized to ensure reproducibility in film growth and compositional consistency. • Validation Procedure: A systematic approach to validating the deposition process, focused on confirming the incorporation of copper into the hydroxyapatite matrix and verifying the formation of crystalline HAp-Cu films through targeted characterization techniques, distinct from exhaustive physicochemical or biological evaluations. The methodology described herein establishes a reliable framework for the fabrication of HAp-Cu coatings via PAPLD, offering a reproducible route for future studies requiring precise control over dopant incorporation within hydroxyapatite-based thin films. For further details regarding the physicochemical characterization and biological assessment of the resulting coatings, the reader is referred to a complementary publication by the authors.

Lactosucrose is a functional trisaccharide with prebiotic properties and growing potential in food and agricultural applications; however, its industrial production is limited by low conversion efficiency and high downstream processing costs. In this study, a whole-cell biocatalyst was developed by displaying β-galactosidase on Lactococcus sp. KTH0-1S using a nisin-inducible expression system, the USP45 signal peptide, and a LysM anchoring domain. The engineered strain exhibited a maximum whole-cell β-galactosidase activity of 146.0 Miller units after 4 h of induction. The whole-cell enzyme efficiently catalyzed lactosucrose synthesis from lactose and sucrose, with optimal activity observed at pH 6.0 and 50 °C. Substrate molar ratio significantly influenced product formation, and the highest lactosucrose concentration (15,940 mg/L) was achieved at a lactose:sucrose ratio of 1:3. Reusability studies revealed high initial catalytic activity but limited stability upon repeated reaction cycles, likely due to the non-covalent nature of LysM-mediated surface anchoring. Molecular docking analysis supported the experimental observations by identifying a high-affinity substrate-binding pocket capable of accommodating both donor and acceptor substrates, providing a structural rationale for enhanced transgalactosylation under sucrose-enriched conditions. Overall, this study demonstrates the feasibility of using a whole-cell biocatalyst based on Lactococcus sp. for efficient lactosucrose production and highlights its potential as a cost-effective and food-compatible platform for the synthesis of functional oligosaccharides.

Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), remains a major global health challenge, with approximately 10.8 million new cases and 1.25 million deaths reported in 2023. Human responses to M.tb are heterogeneous with clinical outcomes including bacterial clearance, asymptomatic latent M.tb infection, and severe fatal pulmonary TB. Here, we aim to address knowledge gaps in the organization of M.tb granulomas by identifying cell-based spatial features indicating asymptomatic lung infection. To address this gap, which cannot be directly studied in humans, we used lung sections from M.tb-infected Diversity Outbred mice with acute pulmonary TB, asymptomatic M.tb infection, or chronic pulmonary TB that were stained for T cells, B cells, macrophages, and bronchiolar epithelial cells by multiplexed immunofluorescence. We first developed a new, accurate model to automatically segment lung granulomas, detect/quantify the cell types within granulomas, and extract the location of immune cells in granulomas for each disease state. Analysis of model-derived results shows that lung granulomas from asymptomatic mice have a characteristic spatial profile consisting of higher CD4+ and CD8a+ T cell densities, closer B cell proximity to bronchiolar epithelium, and increased T cell-macrophage proximity in asymptomatic M.tb infection. Next, we propose a second novel approach to utilize a large language model (LLM) to independently decode complex cellular patterns within granulomas, and distinguish key immunological signatures: balanced immune expression in asymptomatic M.tb mice, dysfunctional responses with low cellularity in acute TB, and highest immune-cell abundance in chronic TB. Overall, the results from this study show that lung granulomas in asymptomatic infection are characterized by increased T cell density, increased numbers of peribronchiolar B cells, and T cells closer to macrophages as compared to acute and chronic TB. These methods and results help establish an automated pipeline to extract and analyze data from multiplexed fluorescence images and provide a foundation to better understand how granuloma architecture varies by disease state.

Heparan sulfate (HS) a glycosaminoglycan family of carbohydrates, is covalently attached to core proteins forming heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs) which are found on the surface of cells. Following endocytosis, HSPGs are degraded within lysosomes by several enzymes, including α-N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAGLU). Absence of NAGLU leads to Mucopolysaccharidosis III type B (Sanfilippo type B), a lysosomal storage disease, which in Naglu-/- mice was suggested to result in infertility. Since endocytosis is a feature of epididymal epithelial and immune cells, a plausible explanation could be excessive accumulation of lysosomes in these cells in 7-month-old mice. EM analysis revealed a massive accumulation of pale lysosomes (LM-IHC/LAMP2 + /cathepsin B+) of varying shapes and sizes in the cytoplasm of principal cells, unlike the small dense spherical lysosomes of wild type mice. Their presence had a profound effect on the integrity of organelles such as the ER, Golgi, mitochondria and nucleus. In addition, the epithelium demonstrated sporadic large, highly vacuolated cells, identified as CD68+ and MOMA+ epididymal mononuclear phagocytes (eMPs), with a cytoplasm dominated by pale lysosomes, some of gigantic size. The plethora of lysosomes overwhelming the cytoplasm suggested an ongoing phagocytic activity to protect the epithelium despite the excessive disruption of their organelles. A distinguishing feature of the content of lysosomes of eMPs was the presence of aggregates of small flattened membranous discs aligned parallel to one another, referred to as zebra bodies. The latter had the appearance of mitochondrial cristae of principal cells and were reactive for a mitochondrial marker, suggesting a phagocytic activity for eMPs of degenerating principal cells. Taken together, our data demonstrates that the accumulation of lysosomes of epithelial cells and eMPs dramatically altered their structural appearance in the absence of NAGLU inducing an inactivation of their critical role in supporting a proper epithelial environment for sperm protection and maturation.