Noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques have been used to facilitate the recovery from prolonged unconsciousness as a result of brain injury. The aim of this study is to systematically assess the effects of NIBS in patients with a disorder of consciousness (DOC). We searched four databases for any randomized controlled trials on the effect of NIBS in patients with a DOC, which used the JFK Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) as the primary outcome measure. A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to pool effect sizes. Fourteen studies with 273 participants were included in this review, of which 12 studies with sufficient data were included in the meta-analysis. Our meta-analysis showed a significant effect on increasing CRS-R scores in favor of real stimulation as compared to sham (Hedges’ g = 0.522; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.318–0.726; P < 0.0001, I ² = 0.00%). Subgroup analysis demonstrated that only anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) significantly enhances the CRS-R scores in patients with a DOC, as compared to sham (Hedges’ g = 0.703; 95% CI, 0.419–0.986; P < 0.001), and this effect was predominant in patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS) (Hedges’ g = 0.815; 95% CI, 0.429–1.200; P < 0.001). Anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC appears to be an effective approach for patients with MCS.

Pathological conditions in diabetic feet cause surface temperature variations, which can be captured quantitatively using infrared thermography. Thermal images captured during recovery of diabetic feet after active cooling may reveal richer information than those from passive thermography, but diseased foot regions may exhibit very small temperature differences compared with the surrounding area, complicating plantar foot segmentation in such cold-stressed active thermography. In this study, we investigate new plantar foot segmentation methods for thermal images obtained via cold-stressed active thermography without the complementary information from color or depth channels. To better deal with the temporal variations in thermal image contrast when planar feet are recovering from cold immersion, we propose an image pre-processing method using a two-stage adaptive gamma transform to alleviate the impact of such contrast variations. To improve upon existing deep neural networks for segmenting planar feet from cold-stressed infrared thermograms, a new deep neural network, the Plantar Foot Segmentation Network (PFSNet), is proposed to better extract foot contours. It combines the fundamental U-shaped network structure, a multi-scale feature extraction module, and a convolutional block attention module with a feature fusion network. The PFSNet, in combination with the two-stage adaptive gamma transform, outperforms multiple existing deep neural networks in plantar foot segmentation for single-channel infrared images from cold-stressed infrared thermography, achieving an accuracy of 97.3% and 95.4% as measured by Intersection over Union (IOU) and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) respectively.

Insufficient proliferation, differentiation, and migration are the main pitfalls of neural stem cells (NSCs) in reparative therapeutics for the central nervous system (CNS) diseases. The potent lipid mediator sphingosine‐1‐phosphate (S1P) regulates cells’ biological behavior broadly in the CNS. However, the effects of activating S1P on NSCs are not quite clear. In the current study, FTY720 (Fingolimod), an analog of S1P, was employed to induce the proliferation, differentiation, and migration of cultured brain‐derived NSCs. The results indicated that proliferation and migration ability of NSCs were promoted by FTY720. Though we observed no obvious neuron prefers differentiation of NSCs, there were more protoplasmic astrocytes developed in the presence of certain concentration of FTY720. This work gives more comprehensive understanding of how FTY720 affects NSCs.

The aim of the present study was to examine the concurrent validity of 2 Chinese versions of the short version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in patients with stroke, i.e., MoCA 5-minute protocol and National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Canadian Stroke Network (NINDS-CSN) 5-minute Protocol. A total of 54 patients and 27 healthy controls were enrolled in this study. In this study, the Neurobehavioural Cognitive Status Examination (NCSE) was used as an external criterion of cognitive impairment. We found that the 5-min protocol did not differ from the MoCA in differentiating patients with cognitive impairments from those without (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, AUC, of 0.948 for the MoCA 5-min protocol v.s. 0.984 for MoCA, P = 0.097). These three assessments demonstrated equal performance in differentiating patients with stroke from controls. The Chinese version of the MoCA 5-min protocol can be used as a valid screening for patients with stroke.