1. The nonpsychoactive cannabinoid abnormal-cannabidiol (trans-4-[3-methyl-6-(1-methylethenyl)-2-cyclohexen-1-yl]-5-pentyl-1,3-benzenediol) (abn-cbd) produced concentration-dependent relaxation of methoxamine-precontracted rat small mesenteric artery. Endothelial removal reduced abn-cbd potency six-fold without affecting the maximum relaxation. 2. In endothelium-intact vessels, abn-cbd was less...

Appropriate nephron function is dependent on the intrarenal arrangement of blood vessels. The preferred and primary means to study the architecture of intrarenal circulation has been by filling it with opaque substances such as india ink, radio-opaque contrast material, or various polymers for study by light or scanning electron microscopy. With such methodologies, superficial vessels may obscu...

PURPOSE To investigate adrenomedullin-induced relaxation in isolated porcine ciliary arteries. METHODS In a myograph system (isometric force measurement), precontracted vessels ( approximately 0.1 micro M U46619; thromboxane A(2) analogue or approximately 10 nM endothelin-1) were exposed, in a cumulative manner, to increasing concentrations of adrenomedullin (1 nM to 1 micro M) in the presenc...

On the basis of the flow feature in the micro blood vessels, a method to track the trace of cell movement was proposed in this paper. The algorithm employed the space domain enhancement, adaptive threshold segmentation techniques. For the sake of calculating blood flow, the active contour-based template matching method was applied to sequential images. The experimental results show that this me...

Impact of stress on diseases including gastrointestinal failure is well-known, but molecular mechanism is not understood. Here we show underlying molecular mechanism using EAE mice. Under stress conditions, EAE caused severe gastrointestinal failure with high-mortality. Mechanistically, autoreactive-pathogenic CD4+ T cells accumulated at specific vessels of boundary area of third-ventricle, tha...

One of the major complications of diabetes is diabetic retinopathy. As manual analysis and diagnosis of large amount of images are time consuming, automatic detection and grading of diabetic retinopathy are desired. In this paper, we use fundus fluorescein angiography and color fundus images simultaneously, extract 6 features employing curvelet transform, and feed them to support vector machine...

Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdUrd) is used extensively to measure the fraction of proliferating cells in tumors. Unlike endogenous markers of proliferation such as proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and Ki-67, BrdUrd is exogenously administered and reaches the tumor via vasculature where it must then diffuse throughout the tissue to label S-phase cells. In this study, we examine the dose depende...

A tumor vasculature network undergoes intense growth and rebuilding during tumor growth. Traditionally, vascular networks are histologically examined using parameters such as vessel density determined from two-dimensional slices of the tumor. Two-dimensional probing of a complicated three-dimensional (3D) structure only provides partial information. Therefore, we propose the use of microcompute...