TTU Review

AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a cellular energy sensor which plays a crucial role in regulation of whole-body energy homeostasis. Activation of AMPK signaling results in favorable effects on mitochondrial function, autophagy, glucose/lipid metabolism, and insulin sensitivity, making it an important therapeutic target in treatment/prevention of metabolic disorders and cancer. Recently, pharmacological studies of natural phenolic compounds indicated that the benefits on metabolic health of these phytochemicals are not only related to their protogenic antioxidant property but also to their AMPK-activating potential. Due to their diverse structures, identification of phenolic compound molecules which have potential to target the AMPK activation for beneficial metabolic effects may be promising in order to develop novel therapeutics in the prevention and/or treatment of metabolic disorders. In this minireview, we summarize beneficial metabolic outcomes of AMPK activation and discuss the capability of natural polyphenols to activate the AMPK pathway focusing on the phenolic acids as potential lead compounds.

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Maternal obesity/diabetes severely affects the offspring’s metabolism not only during the fetal and early life development but also later on in the childhood and adulthood stages. Recent evidence suggested that maternal metformin treatment during pregnancy and breastfeeding might provide long-term metabolic benefits on offspring’s glucose homeostasis. We employed a mouse model of maternal overnutrition induced by high fat diet (HFD) to investigate whether an early metformin treatment in mouse dams during lactation period attenuates the maternal HFD-induced metabolic complications in male offspring. The results showed that male offspring from metformin-exposed mothers during suckling period displayed lower body weight and decreased white fat contents. Furthermore, these male offspring had lower blood glucose levels, decreased hyperinsulinemia, enhanced glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. Moreover, we found that short-term metformin treatment during lactation period in mouse dams solely improved the glucose tolerance of male offspring exposed with high fat diet (HFD) during both in utero and early postnatal stages, which might primarily result from an increase in insulin secretion. However, this metformin treatment in mouse dams was enabled to abolish most of the metabolic complications of the male offspring exposed with HFD during lactation period. Together, these findings suggest that an early intervention in mouse dams by metformin treatment during lactation period may provide long-term metabolic benefits in regulation of male offspring’s glucose homeostasis.

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Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is often referred to several different diseases and disorders of the heart and blood vessels that constitute cardiovascular or heart disease. CVD is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Atherosclerosis is the most common pathological process leading to CVD, a disease of medium to large arteries that majorly causes heart attacks and strokes. The pathogenesis of atherosclerosis lesion is a very complex process that is associated with thickening of the intima layer, weakening of underlying intima. Many components of the vascular, metabolic, and immune systems are involved in this process. These lesions have been presented even in teenagers and young adults and although not clinically significant at this stage, these lesions possess the potential to develop into clinically relevant lesions later on in over decades of life. This article will give an overview relationship between atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.

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Biomedical Image Processing, such as human organ segmentation and disease analysis, is a modern field in medicine development and patient treatment. Besides there are many kinds of image formats, the diversity and complexity of biomedical data is still a big issue to all of researchers in their applications. In order to deal with the problem, deep learning give us a successful and effective solutions. Unet and LSTM are two general approaches to the most of case of medical image data. While Unet helps to teach a machine in learning data from each image accompanied with its labelled information, LSTM helps to remember states from many slices of images by times. Unet gives us the segmentation of tumor, abnormal things from biomedical images and then the LSTM gives us the effective diagnosis on a patient disease. In this paper, we show some scenarios of using Unets and LSTM to segment and analysis on many kinds of human organ images and results of brain, retinal, skin, lung and breast segmentation.

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Causal inference has been of interest in economics for many decades with a great deal of notable work like the Granger’s causality which directly lead to a Nobel Prize in Economics. The question of cause and effect is of paramount importance in making high-stake decisions such as economic policies. Besides, in the last ten years, causal inference in artificial intelligence has gradually become a mainstream with remarkable work such as the do-calculus by Judea Pearl. In this paper, we would like to discuss some fundamental ideas in causal inference.

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Management existed as early as mankind. It has a biblical foundation and reference. It has been practiced for thousands of years and organized projects were directed by people responsible for planning, organizing, leading and controlling. Management theories and practices evolved in the past showing the evolving nature and character of management. Early management scholars and contributors recognized the existence of the three approaches of management which are classical approach, behavioural approach and integrative approach. This research article presents the evolving nature of management thoughts and practices from the early approaches of management to modern approaches to management. This in effect would give the much clearer understanding of hundreds of definition of management ranging from simple to complex. And that management is not only the process of getting things done effectively and efficiently, with and through people but it also has become a social institution. Hence, it cannot escape social issues.

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This study provides a strategic analysis on Tan Tao University MBA Program. The main objective of this study is to analyse the readiness of the Tan Tao University to offer an MBA Program and the effectiveness of the curriculum of the proposed MBA Program focusing on four areas such as human resource, facilities and equipment, research aspect and opportunities for development and formulate recommendations based on the findings that would boost the SBE MBA Program. Data is collected through questionnaire using convenience sampling in order to give a comprehensive view of students and faculty members’ perceptions. Data collected have been presented in tabular forms using weighted mean and percentage to facilitate understanding of the study. Managers of today’s organization must comprehend the essentials of individual and group behaviour if they are to motivate and communicate with others in the organizations. They must understand administrative processes if they are to plan and organize its operations. They must familiarize themselves with mathematical and statistical procedures if they are to efficiently control what goes on in an organization. Every company has its leaders and managers. They are the people who get things done, make things happen, and make the decisions that will make the difference between success and failure. It is this special breed of accomplishedprofessionalsforwhomtheGraduateSchoolofBusinessofTanTaoUniversityisdesigned.

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This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of morphological analysis instruction on gradetenbiology-major studentsin TanTaoHigh SchoolfortheGifted inLong An, Vietnam, andto find out whether they can catch up with the level of biotechnology students in Tan Tao University, in terms of science vocabulary performance. The instruction selectively targeted technical multisyllabic words that occur frequently in the participants’ corpus. Thirty-one students including eighteen grade-ten biology students as the experimental group and thirteen biotechnology students as the control group participated in the study. For data collection, pre-posttest was designed, validated and applied for the experimental and control group. Apart from the regular teaching method, the experimental group also received explicit morphemic analysis instruction, while the control group only received their regular teaching. Pretest to posttest results revealed that each group registered an increase in the respective means, however, the experimental group surpassed the control group up to 5.9 mean difference. Morphemic analysis confirms its effectiveness in boosting the students’ vocabulary acquisition of multisyllabic terminologies that facilitates their learning. The paper ended with some pedagogical implications for teaching technical terms.

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These years, the debate surrounding the role of the first language (L1) in the second/foreign language (L2) classrooms in general and in English ones has been a controversial issue. On one hand, people support the idea that the influence of mother tongue should be excluded from second language acquisition. Meanwhile, the component of English-only method emphasizes the significance from the use of L1 in English classes. This paper aims to investigate the positive influences of the use of Vietnamese in English learning process. From this point, two main things will be demonstrated. Firstly, using Vietnamese has a facilitating role to play in the classroom and can actually boost students’ learning. And secondly, there are good reasons for teachers and students to use Vietnamese to fully suit the context of specific lessons. To conduct this study, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used. First of all, an online survey was conducted to collect realistic information from the students’ perspective. On the other hand, there were some in-depth interviews for teachers and tutors to express their experience as well as their own ideas about this issue. Finally, two separate classes were formally observed when they took a sample lesson which was taught in different methods. At the end of the course, a small test was provided to students to examine how much they understood their lesson. All the statistics and information received was analyzed, then mentioned in the paper.

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Breast cancer is one of the most leading causes of death in females all over the world. Although, the incidence rate of breast cancer is low, the death proportion is relatively high. For breast cancer patients, the recurrence ratio is rare, yet it still happens. The highest risk of recurrence usually happens at the early time of treatment, and its severeness depends on the diagnosed stage and the size of the tumor. However, the recurrence prognostic of breast cancer still limited due to the poor prediction strength of input data. Therefore, in this study we used four independent data sets (n = 793) with the same chipsets (HG-U133A) of breast cancer patients to investigate a 67 gene signature used in further building the prognostic model for breast cancer patients. Our results finally confirmed that a 67 gene set was significantly associated with the recurrence (RFS) (p = 1.66e−17), and overall survival (OS) (p = 9.27e−06). Besides, the gene signature also correlated with survival outcomes, such as RFS (p = 0.00167), and distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS) (p < 0.001). Remarkably, our classification analysis results reveal that the breast cancer patients who were categorized into the low-risk group tend to have significantly associated with the longer recurrence time in both training and validation data sets. In conclusion, the 67 gene signature should be considered as potential candidates to be used in building up models or integrated into the current treatment regime for breast cancer.

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VIETNAMESE UNIVERSITIES AND REGIONAL ACCREDITATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian universities view the importanceofnationalaccreditationsecondarytointernationalrecognition. As a result, Southeast Asian regional accreditors are expanding their university networks and forming international standard education in Southeast Asia. However, the link between Asian and American accreditation has yet to be formed, even though America is the number one education destination for internationalstudents. Theresearchpaperthatthisproposalintends to put forth will evaluate the differences in Asian and American regional accreditation; it will highlight potential academic, institutional, and cultural issues that may arise when a Vietnamese university seeks American regional accreditation.

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