Chen Bin
Full Professor
State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering
Xi'an Jiaotong University, China

Speech title: Skin Cooling for Laser Treatment of Hyperpigmented Skin Diseases
Abstract:
Hyperpigmented skin diseases (Nevus of Ota, freckles, melisma, etc.) are the darkening of skin caused by excessive production of melanosomes, which can be caused by UV-induced DNA damage, sun damage, inflammation or other skin injuries. Based on the theory of selective photothermolysis, 755 nm alexandrite and 1064 nm Nd:YAG Q-switched lasers have been proven effective in the treatment of these hyperpigmented skin diseases. The targets of such laser surgeries are hyperplastic melanosomes within epidermis or dermis, but heat absorption by normal, epidermal melanosomes can lead to thermal damage of epidermis. The use of external cooling is helpful to protect the epidermis from thermal damage and raise laser energy density, thereby improving treatment effect and reducing patients’ pain. Nevertheless, cryogen spray cooling or cold air cooling, which has been commonly used in laser treatment of Port Wine Stain to protect the skin from unwanted thermal damage, has not been introduced to the laser surgery of such. Investigation on skin cooling procedures is therefore urgently needed.
In the present work, a four-layer Nevus of Ota skin model was established that consists of a skin tissue matrix and melanin granules superposed on the matrix. The Multi-Layer Monte-Carlo method is adopted to simulate light propagation and energy deposition in the skin tissue. The temperature distribution of the matrix and melanin granules after laser radiation can be obtained by using the local thermodynamic non-equilibrium two-temperature model. With above models, we investigated the temperature distributions of the skin after 755 nm and 1064 nm laser radiation without cooling, with CSC and cold air cooling, respectively. The results show that 1064 nm-laser has better performance than 755-nm laser when dealing with melanosomes buried deeper in the dermis. CSC is effective but can only chill down the epidermis and the superficial layer of dermis. It is sufficient for skin protection in 1064 nm laser treatment. In comparison, continuous cold air cooling can cause a larger drop in dermal temperature, which can effectively protect the dermis. When 100ms of CSC combining 15s of -10oC cold air cooling is implemented, temperatures of the tissue and epidermal melanosomes are below their temperature threshold. In summary, CSC combining cold air cooling is the best way for skin protection from thermal damage in 755 nm laser treatment of Ota’s Nevus.

Hui Sun
Full Professor
Academy of Opto-Electronics
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Speech title: Femtosecond laser subsurface scleral treatment in cadaver human sclera and evaluation using two-photon and confocal microscopy
Abstract:
Purpose: Glaucoma is the second-leading cause of blindness worldwide and is often associated with elevated intraocular pressure (IOP). Partial-thickness drainage channels can be created with femtosecond laser in the translucent sclera for the potential treatment of glaucoma. In this pilot study we demonstrate the creation of partial-thickness subsurface drainage channels with the femtosecond laser in the cadaver human eyeballs and describe the application of two-photon microscopy and confocal microscopy for noninvasive imaging of the femtosecond laser created partial-thickness scleral channels in cadaver human eyes.
Methods: A femtosecond laser operating at a wavelength of 1700 nm was scanned along a rectangular raster pattern to create the partial thickness subsurface drainage channels in the sclera of cadaver human eyes. IOP was measured before and 20 minutes after the laser treatment to evaluate the acute effect of the procedure. Analysis of the dimensions and location of these channels is important in understanding their effects. We describe the application of two-photon microscopy and confocal microscopy for noninvasive imaging of the femtosecond laser created partial-thickness scleral channels in cadaver human eyes.
Results: High-resolution images, hundreds of microns deep in the sclera, were obtained to allow determination of the shape and dimension of such partial thickness subsurface scleral channels. Comparison of pre- and postoperative IOP measurements in treated and control eyes revealed a reduction in the intraocular pressure due to the increased rate of aqueous humor (AH) outflow resulted in by the presence of the partial thickness scleral channels.
Conclusions: The confocal and two-photon microscopy can be used to investigate femtosecond-laser created partial-thickness drainage channels in the sclera of cadaver human eyes. Our studies suggest that reduction in IOP achieved by the partial thickness channels which created by femtosecond laser suggests potential utility in the treatment of glaucoma.

Y-h.Taguchi
Professor
Department of Physics
Chuo University, Japan

Speech title: Principal component analysis and tensor decomposition bases unsupervised feature extraction applied to bioinformatics analysis
Abstract:
Although identification of differentially expressed genes (DEG) as well as genes associated aberrant epigenetic profiles (e.g., promoter methylation) have ever been important tasks, they have not ever been fully addressed. For this purpose, in recent years, I proposed principal component analysis (PCA) and tensor decomposition (TD) based unsupervised feature extraction (FE); they were applied to wide range of bioinformatic analyses. The examples of applications are biomarker identification, identification of disease causing genes, and in silico drug discovery. PCA/TD based unsupervised FE could often outperform conventional supervised FEs, e.g., identification of DEGs even when other supervised FE failed, identification of biologically more reliable set of genes, more stable (more independent of samples) identification of DEGS, more numbers between independent samples, and so on. In this keynote, I will introduce this methodology and discuss some of numerous applications.

Congo Tak Shing CHING
Professor
Graduate Institute of Biomedical Engineering
National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

Speech title: The application of physical forces and bioimpedance for non-invasive medical diagnostics
Abstract:
In our days electric potential, current and impedance are significant not only in our daily life but also in medical diagnostics. Medical communities have successfully applied them to the noninvasive diagnostics of various conditions of the human body. The intention of developing noninvasive medical diagnostics (NIMD) is to facilitate the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. The early diagnosis and treatment of many diseases, including cancers, is critical not only for prolonging and improving the quality of life but also for reducing medical costs. NIMD can be defined as those methods used to examine the human body without invading the integrity of the body. There are lots of NIMD, like ultrasonic diagnostics, infrared diagnostics and etc, but this speech will not discuss with them. The speaker cites his own research experiences in applying electric potential, current and impedance in NIMD. Strictly speaking, this speech focuses on the application of reverse iontophoresis and electroporation for noninvasive and transdermal metabolites/biomarkers extraction. This talk will also introduce the application of bioimpedance for tissue characterization, like cancerous tissue.

Zhongming Zhao
Professor
School of Biomedical Informatics and School of Public Health
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Speech title: Identifying Actionable and Druggable Mutations from Cancer Big Data
Abstract:
As we entered the precision medicine and big data science era, there are many unmet challenges on identifying the disease related information from large, heterogeneous data, and translating the findings for clinical use. Among these challenges, one is how to effectively identify driver mutations and genes in cancer genomes, especially those with the potential for druggable targets for the development of molecularly targeted cancer therapies (i.e. actionable mutations). In this talk, I will first review the computational methods and tools that were recently developed to meet the strong demand on mining cancer big data. Then, I will present some informatics and biostatistics approaches for identifying cancer mutations and genes from large amount of somatic mutation data, including our recent methods based on mutation set enrichment analysis (MSEA), Gene Gravity, and protein structural features. In the last part, I will introduce our integrative network-based framework for identifying new druggable targets and anticancer indications from existing drugs.

Jun Zhu
Professor
Institute of Bioinformatics
Zhejiang University, China

Speech title: Association analysis explored substantial role of epistasis and ethnicity interactions in controlling BMI of MESA population
Abstract: Body Mass Index (BMI) is an important trait attributed by genetic effects and their environment interactions. In recent years, genetic behaviors of BMI has rarely been characterized for similarities and differences in the architecture for multi-ethnic groups. We conduct association analysis of BMI with genetic variants and their ethnic specific effects. Ten quantitative trait SNPs (QTSs) with individual genetic effects and also eight pairs of QTSs with epistasis effects were identified by analyzing BMI of multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis (MESA) population. Estimated total heritability was 79.87% with higher contribution from dominance and dominance related epistasis effects (52.40%). Ethnicity specific genetics (GE) had large contribution to phenotypic variation (44.83%). Genetic effects of the variants across and within different ethnic groups were investigated. We observed that at the several individual and epistasis loci, most Chinese-Americans (91% or more) carry negative effects. Compared with other ethnic groups, these may be the facts that BMI of group C-A is lower. The C-A specific genotypes of the loci were A/A of rs7763896 ( –0.42 for 100% C-A individuals), G/G of rs2504934 ( –2.59 for 99.25% C-A individuals), T/T of rs620175 ( –0.83 for 99.85% C-A individuals), G/G of rs6435678 ( –1.30 for 91.99% C-A individuals) and G/G×T/T of rs2504934 × rs620175 ( –0.37 for 99.10% C-A individuals). Conditional association analysis of BMI was conducted to investigate the impact of different lifestyle cofactors on BMI loci. We observed that the influence of lifestyle cofactors might depend on the genotype of the causal loci. In this analysis, we identified several new genes associated with BMI. Bioinformatics analysis using Biopubinfo showed that these genes are associated with several diseases, including high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes etc., while BMI has been shown to be a risk factor for these diseases.