Automatic pain assessment is an application in healthcare serving personalized pain care, and patients cannot self-report pain. Pain at the present is inferred from physiological dynamics at the present and in the near past. However, heterogeneous pain responses cross-subject and cross-type hinder accurate recognition of pain. This work solves the adaptive pain recognition problem across pain types. We concrete the adaptivity problem into recognizing both phasic/short and tonic/long pain from the physiological sequences of the same length. The adaptivity of the proposed solution (TCAtt-PainNet) was ensured by hybrid temporal-channel attention when fusing multivariate time-series of electrocardiogram (ECG) and galvanic skin response (GSR) features. The attention was obtained by learning the dependencies between the point at present and the sequence in the near past, where sequence point temporal attention was constructed via modified self-attention, and the following feature channel attention was constructed by squeeze-and-excitation temporal attention weighted deep feature sequence. The proposed solution successfully enhanced recognition adaptivity by addressing relevant information only from long input sequences when testing with tonic and phasic pain databases, making progress towards automatic pain assessment for real application scenarios with attributes unknown pain.

An important imaging technique in biomedicine, the conventional optical microscopy relies on relatively complicated and bulky lens and alignment mechanics. Based on the Gabor holography, the lensless digital holographic microscopy has the advantages of light weight and low cost. It has developed rapidly and received attention in many fields. However, the finite pixel size at the sensor plane limits the spatial resolution. In this study, we first review the principle of lensless digital holography, then go over some methods to improve image contrast and discuss the methods to enhance the image resolution of the lensless holographic image. Moreover, the applications of lensless digital holographic microscopy in biomedicine are reviewed. Finally, we look forward to the future development and prospect of lensless digital holographic technology.

Auxin response factor (ARF) is a transcription factor that can specifically bind to the promoter of auxin-responsive genes in plants and plays an important regulatory role in plant growth and development. The previous studies have predicted 25 ARF genes in Sorghum bicolor (SbARFs) and indicated that SbARFs play complex roles in salt and drought stresses. In this study, we reclassified and analyzed the structures of ARFs in three plants, including sorghum, rice, and Arabidopsis. Phylogenetic analyses categorized 73 ARF into five classes. By studying the characterization of the structures, it was found that SbARFs from the same evolutionary branches showed similar motif patterns. Furthermore, the expression patterns of SbARF genes during development and temperature stress were investigated in sorghum. Quantitative transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) results suggested that they had different expression patterns in vegetative and reproductive organs at various developmental stages. High and low-temperature treatments and qRT-PCR demonstrated some of them changed dramatically along with the increase of treatment time. Additionally, in situ hybridization results displayed that SbARF genes were accumulated in vascular tissues under temperature stress. These findings provide evidence that SbARFs may play important roles in sorghum vegetative development, reproductive development, and auxin response to temperature stress.

Mesoscale volumetric imaging is of great importance for the study of bio-organisms. Among others, optical projection tomography provides unprecedented structural details of specimens, but it requires fluorescence label for chemical targeting. Raman spectroscopic imaging is able to identify chemical components in a label-free manner but lacks microstructure. Here, we present a dual-modality optical-Raman projection tomography (ORPT) technology, which enables label-free three-dimensional imaging of microstructures and components of millimeter-sized samples with a micron-level spatial resolution on the same device. We validate the feasibility of our ORPT system using images of polystyrene beads in a volume, followed by detecting biomolecules of zebrafish and Arabidopsis , demonstrating that fused three-dimensional images of the microstructure and molecular components of bio-samples could be achieved. Last, we observe the fat body of Drosophila melanogaster at different developmental stages. Our proposed technology enables bimodal label-free volumetric imaging of the structure and function of biomolecules in a large sample.

Quantum Dots (QDs), whose diameters are often limited to 10 nm, have been of interest to researchers for their unique optical characteristics, which are attributed to quantum confinement. Following their early application in the electrical industry as light-emitting diode materials, semiconductor nanocrystals have continued to show great potential in clinical diagnosis and biomedical applications. The conventional physical and chemical pathways for QD syntheses typically require harsh conditions and hazardous reagents, and these products encounter non-hydrophilic problems due to organic capping ligands when they enter the physiological environment. The natural reducing abilities of living organisms, especially microbes, are then exploited to prepare QDs from available metal precursors. Low-cost and eco-friendly biosynthesis approaches have the potential for further biomedical applications which benefit from the good biocompatibility of protein-coated QDs. The surface biomass offers many binding sites to modify substances or target ligands, therefore achieving multiple functions through simple and efficient operations. Biosynthetic QDs could function as bioimaging and biolabeling agents because of their luminescence properties similar to those of chemical QDs. In addition, extensive research has been carried out on the antibacterial activity, metal ion detection and bioremediation. As a result, this review details the advanced progress of biomedical applications of biosynthesized QDs and illustrates these principles as clearly as possible.