Search Results (371)

This study re-examines a previously undocumented mural panel in the second-story circumambulation corridor of Shalu Monastery, Tibet. Challenging conventional dating, it attributes the murals to the expansion under Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1306–1333) rather than a later period. Furthermore, their precise date likely falls after Butön Rinpoche assumed the role of abbort in 1320. The iconographic program, centered on Śākyamuni and Maitreya and flanked by the Thousand Buddhas of the Bhadrakalpa, integrates narratives of the Buddha’s life and Maitreya’s descent. The inclusion of Cakravartin ideology reflects the politico-religious ideology of the Yuan era. The analysis argues that the mural design embodies the Buddhist vision of Butön Rinpoche, synthesizing doctrines of prophecy, the integration of the Thousand Buddhas into the Vajraśekhara Maṇḍala system, kingship, etc., and establishes these murals as an influential early paradigm in Tibetan medieval art. Full article

The sacredness of religious architecture stems from embodied spatial perception and interactive effects. This study examines the Sakyamuni Pagoda of Fogong Temple in Shanxi Province and explores the generative mechanism of its sacred space through fieldwork, literature analysis, and textual semantic analysis. Findings reveal that the Sakyamuni Pagoda’s sacredness is not an inherent property but is constructed through bodily pilgrimage practices, following a path from sensory experience to cognitive assessment. On the one hand, the pagoda’s material spatial form, the spiritual symbolism of its mural religious images, and the embodied practices of presence collectively constitute a perceptual realm of sacredness. On the other hand, these experiences are deepened into enduring sacred memories and collective identity through cognitive assessment activities such as emotional responses and meaning interpretation. The study reveals the generative logic of sacredness—from perception to internalization—within the continuous interaction between “body and space”, providing theoretical reference for the spatial interpretation of religious architecture and heritage revitalization. Full article

Flap reconstruction remains a cornerstone after oncologic resection, trauma, and complex wounds, yet partial necrosis, venous congestion, and delayed healing continue to drive morbidity and unplanned re-exploration. Even when macroscopic inflow and outflow are re-established, distal and border-zone tissue may remain constrained by microcirculatory dysfunction. This review frames flap compromise as a biomimetics-relevant failure of a hierarchical transport network and summarizes the vascular repair mechanisms that regenerative interventions aim to replicate. We outline key concepts governing flap perfusion, including angiosomes, choke vessels, endothelial barrier failure, mural cell support, and immune regulation within the angiogenic niche, and relate these to no-reflow, thrombo-inflammation, and impaired vascular regeneration. We then synthesize regenerative strategies aimed at durable reperfusion, spanning recombinant factors, gene and nucleic acid delivery, cell-based therapies, cell-free biologics, including extracellular vesicles and platelet-derived products, pharmacologic modulators, and biomaterial platforms that localize and sustain bioactivity. Translation will require functional perfusion endpoints, standardized reporting of delivery parameters, and safety-conscious designs that minimize aberrant angiogenesis and vector-related risks in post-resection settings. Full article

Inflammatory bowel disease is a recognized risk factor for venous thromboembolism, whereas arterial thrombotic events remain underappreciated despite their substantial clinical consequences. We report a 45-year-old man without significant comorbidities who developed severe ulcerative colitis complicated by diffuse arterial thrombosis, including cerebral infarctions, an ascending aortic mural thrombus, iliac artery thrombosis, and multi-organ infarctions. After stabilization with supportive care and anticoagulation, remission-directed ulcerative colitis therapy and a vascular safety–oriented maintenance strategy were initiated, including vedolizumab and individualized secondary thrombosis prevention. To contextualize this presentation, we integrate current evidence on the epidemiology, clinical phenotypes, underlying mechanisms, and risk factors for arterial thrombosis in inflammatory bowel disease, highlight disease activity as a dominant trigger, and summarize therapy-specific vascular safety considerations across IBD treatment classes. Full article

Earthen immovable cultural relics, such as murals and painted clay sculptures, are prone to deterioration (e.g., efflorescence, flaking, and cracking) under long-term preservation conditions. While conventional restoration materials primarily offer reinforcement, they fail to regulate the migration of soluble salts within the relics, which is the main cause of such damage. Herein, aimed at protecting the painted sculptures and murals of the Yungang Grottoes, nano calcium-aluminum layered double hydroxides (Ca-Al LDHs) were prepared, and their effectiveness in regulating salt crystallization within the earthen ground layer, as well as their reinforcement performance were investigated. Simulated salt crystallization tests revealed that coating the ground layer with Ca-Al LDHs delayed salt-induced damage time by 150%. This can be attributed to the ability of Ca-Al LDHs to adsorb sulfate ions from soluble salts, thereby inhibiting the crystallization of magnesium sulfate on the surface of the ground layer. After curing Ca-Al LDHs-coated samples at 35 °C and 55% relative humidity (RH) for 7 days, their surface Leeb hardness increased by 3.1%, and the weight loss rate (measured via tape peeling test) decreased by 38.3%. These results indicate that the surface bonding strength was enhanced following Ca-Al LDHs coating, with the underlying mechanism being the transformation of part of the LDHs into calcium carbonate under the influence of water and carbon dioxide. This study demonstrates that Ca-Al LDHs not only suppress magnesium sulfate crystallization but also provide effective surface consolidation, showing promising potential for application in conserving painted sculptures and murals at the Yungang Grottoes. Full article

Murals are vital cultural heritage assets, yet many are increasingly threatened by long-term natural weathering, environmental erosion, and human-induced damage. Given limited conservation resources, an objective method for prioritizing restoration is urgently needed. This study proposes an Individual-Aware Gradient Boosting Regression (IA-GBR) approach to predict the visual saliency of damaged mural regions by integrating physical damage characteristics, spatial location, and observer identity. We construct an eye-tracking dataset containing complete fixation records from multiple participants viewing diverse mural damage types. IA-GBR employs a two-level feature fusion strategy that combines damage, spatial, and individual features within a gradient boosting residual learning framework. The experimental results demonstrate that IA-GBR consistently outperforms baseline methods, including linear and ridge regression, SVR, decision trees, random forests, AdaBoost, and multilayer perceptrons. Feature importance analysis further reveals the relative contributions of individual differences, damage size, spatial position, and semantic factors to saliency formation. The proposed framework provides data-driven support for restoration prioritization and advances perception-aware saliency modeling in cultural heritage conservation. Full article

Small bowel obstruction (SBO) in dogs is most commonly caused by foreign bodies or neoplasia; however, SBO secondary to transmural fibroplasia remains a rare clinical complication of canine chronic enteropathy. This report describes the complex case of mechanical SBO caused by transmural ileal fibroplasia and inflammation at the ileocolic junction in a 9-year-old mixed-breed dog with concomitant hyperadrenocorticism (HAC). The primary presentation involved chronic severe weight loss and intermittent anorexia, contrasting with the acute presentation typical of most SBO cases. Imaging studies revealed severe, circumferential thickening up to 10 mm of the small intestine wall at the ileocolic junction (ICJ), resulting in complete luminal stricture and marked proximal dilation. Surgical intestinal resection and anastomosis were performed for alleviation of the obstruction, and histopathology confirmed severe mural and serosal enteritis with extensive fibroplasia extending into the adjacent mesentery, thereby excluding neoplastic processes. Quantitative PCR analysis demonstrated a significant upregulation of mRNA expression for PDGFRB and FGFR compared to normal tissue. Postoperative recovery was rapid; although soft feces persisted for one month, normal stool consistency was subsequently restored, and the patient achieved significant weight gain. This case underscores the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges associated with non-neoplastic, inflammation-driven SBO and suggests that activation of the PDGFR-β/FGFR pathways may play a key role in fibroplasia-related intestinal strictures, offering a novel molecular perspective beyond conventional SBO etiologies. Full article

Among the painted wooden tablets found at Dandan Oilik (Khotan), possibly dated to the seventh–eighth century, A. Stein and other scholars pointed to the presence of non-Indian deities that could be rooted in the pre-Buddhist Khotanese religious milieu. Since the language spoken in ancient Khotan belonged to the Eastern Iranian branch of the so-called Indo-European languages, it seemed obvious to some experts to imagine that the local deities depicted on those wooden tablets had an Iranian background. Newly excavated mural paintings from small Buddhist temples in the region of Khotan allowed us to better consider some of these local deities, who presented unique elements and symbolic animals possibly related to other eastern Iranian forms of so-called Zoroastrianism, such as the religion of pre-Islamic Sogdiana and Chorasmia. Full article

Fine-grained visual classification requires recognizing subtle inter-class differences under substantial intra-class variation. Ancient mural recognition poses additional challenges: severe degradation and complex backgrounds introduce noise that obscures discriminative features, limited annotated data restricts model training, and dynasty-specific artistic styles manifest as periodic brushwork patterns and compositional structures that are difficult to capture. Existing spatial-domain methods fail to model the frequency characteristics of textures and the cross-region semantic relationships inherent in mural imagery. To address these limitations, we propose a Vision Transformer (ViT) framework which integrates frequency-domain enhancement, explicit token-relation modeling, adaptive multi-focus inference, and discriminative metric supervision. A Frequency Channel Attention (FreqCA) module applies 2D FFT-based channel gating to emphasize discriminative periodic patterns and textures. A Cross-Token Relation Attention (CTRA) module employs joint global and local gates to strengthen semantically related token interactions across distant regions. An Adaptive Omni-Focus (AOF) block partitions tokens into importance groups for multi-head classification, while Complementary Tokens Integration (CTI) fuses class tokens from multiple transformer layers. Finally, Adaptive Margin Contrastive Center Loss (AMCCL) improves intra-class compactness and inter-class separability with margins adapted to class-center similarities. Experiments on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, and a Dunhuang mural dataset show accuracies of 91.15%, 94.57%, and 94.27%, outperforming the ACC-ViT baseline by 1.35%, 1.63%, and 2.20%, respectively. Full article

Based on the previous investigation results, this article investigates the ’Du khang of Gung ’phur Monastery in sPu rang, mNga’ ris, identifying the images and corresponding inscriptions on its four walls and interpreting the meaning of the murals. The study concludes that the murals were executed in the Water-tiger year (1602), with involvement from the local king and his minister, as well as native donors and painters from neighboring Nepal. A comparative analysis with relevant temples in sPu rang and Ladakh reveals that the murals reflect the popular themes of the ’Bri gung bka’ brgyud school in Western Tibet from the mid-16th to the early 17th century. As such, the murals attest to the spread of the school in mNga’ ris, and provide first-hand materials for research on the history and royal family of sPu rang around the 17th century. Full article

A two-year-old, intact female, domestic fawn-colored dwarf lop rabbit was presented with apathy and anorexia. Clinical examination revealed hypothermia, tachycardia, and abdominal pain. Routine hematology, biochemistry, radiographic and ultrasonographic examinations were performed. Radiographic evaluation demonstrated pneumoperitoneum, generalized small intestinal distention and marked focal dilation of the descending colon by amorphous and partially mineralized material. Ultrasonography confirmed the presence of free gas along with abdominal effusion. Exploratory laparotomy revealed focal perforation of the descending colon associated with mural abscess formation containing fecal material and pus. The severity of the lesions and multiple adhesions to adjacent organs (urinary bladder and uterus) led to the decision for intraoperative euthanasia. This case report describes clinical, imaging and surgical findings of pneumoperitoneum related to septic peritonitis secondary to colonic perforation in a domestic rabbit. Full article

Soot particle deposition is a common form of surface contamination in enclosed architectural environments and can significantly alter the optical appearance of painted surfaces. In the Zhaomiao temple halls of Inner Mongolia, long-term exposure to soot generated by butter lamps and incense burning has led to pronounced color darkening of mural pigments. To clarify the mechanisms by which soot deposition affects pigment optical behavior, this study investigates the surface deposition-induced color degradation of mineral pigment coatings, using Zhaomiao temple murals as a representative application context. Thirty-six typical mineral pigments were prepared as standardized coating specimens, and controlled soot deposition experiments were conducted to simulate progressive particulate accumulation on pigment surfaces. Variations in Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (CIE) XYZ tristimulus values, luminance, and color difference (ΔE) were quantitatively analyzed under different soot-loading conditions. The results show systematic luminance attenuation and chromatic compression with increasing soot deposition, indicating that optical degradation is primarily governed by surface absorption and scattering effects introduced by carbonaceous particles. These results establish a quantitative framework based on measurable optical parameters—rather than a single absolute value—for evaluating particulate-induced optical degradation of pigment coatings. This study provides a quantitative basis for evaluating particulate-induced optical degradation of pigment coatings and supports surface condition assessment and digital reconstruction of soot-contaminated painted surfaces in architectural contexts such as the Zhaomiao temples. Full article

Background: Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, remains endemic throughout Latin America but is increasingly reported in urban areas due to migration and vector adaptation. The cardiac form is the most severe manifestation, associated with arrhythmia, mural thrombus formation, and a high risk of cardioembolic events. Stroke secondary to Chagas cardiomyopathy is uncommon and poses diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. Case Presentation: A 58-year-old woman with serologic evidence of T. cruzi infection presented with sudden-onset dyspnea, oppressive chest pain, and left-sided weakness. Neurological examination revealed left brachiocrural hemiparesis and mild dysarthria (NIHSS = 9). Non-contrast cranial CT showed an acute infarct in the right middle cerebral artery territory (ASPECTS = 7). Electrocardiography demonstrated typical atrial flutter with variable conduction, and transthoracic echocardiography revealed a markedly dilated left atrium containing a mural thrombus and a left ventricular ejection fraction of 45%. Intravenous thrombolysis with alteplase (0.9 mg/kg) was administered within 4.5 h of symptom onset. Pharmacologic rhythm control was achieved using intravenous and oral amiodarone, followed by oral anticoagulation with warfarin (target INR 2.0–3.0) after excluding hemorrhagic transformation. The patient showed rapid neurological improvement (NIHSS reduction from 9 to 2) and was discharged on day 10 with minimal residual deficit (mRS = 1), sinus rhythm, and stable hemodynamics. Conclusions: This case highlights the rare coexistence of Chagas cardiomyopathy, atrial flutter, and cardioembolic stroke due to left atrial thrombus. Early recognition, adherence to evidence-based guidelines, and multidisciplinary management were key to achieving a favorable outcome. Timely diagnosis and intervention remain crucial to preventing severe complications in patients with Chagas disease. Full article

This study presents the first application of an automatic ultrasonic mapping system for the assessment of natural consolidants applied to replicas of painted wall surfaces. In Cultural Heritage conservation, evaluating consolidation efficiency remains a critical issue, particularly for substrates characterized by high porosity, heterogeneity, and mechanical fragility. Ultrasonic testing offers a fully non-contact diagnostic approach capable of detecting variations in cohesion, stiffness, and internal discontinuities, thus overcoming the limitations of semi-invasive mechanical procedures. Three polysaccharide-based consolidants—Arabic gum, Funori, and Opuntia ficus-indica mucilage—were applied to wall-painting replicas prepared according to historically documented techniques. Their performance was investigated through a comparative methodology combining a peeling test with non-contact air-coupled ultrasonic probes. Results indicate that Opuntia mucilage, although still at an experimental stage, provides significant improvements in cohesion, confirming its potential as a sustainable and substrate-compatible alternative to conventional consolidants. By demonstrating the complementary nature of ultrasonic mapping and peeling tests, this work contributes to the development of reproducible, non-invasive diagnostic strategies for evaluating consolidation treatments, particularly on fragile surfaces where conventional mechanical testing is unsuitable. Full article

This paper examines the complex connections between religious painting and vernacular narratives during the Ming dynasty through a case study of the Miaoshan story mural in the Vairochana Hall (Piludian 毗盧殿) of Guanyin Monastery (Guanyinsi 觀音寺) in Xinjin 新津, Sichuan (near Chengdu). This mural constitutes the earliest precisely dated surviving example (completed in 1468 and renovated in 1756) of pictorial representations of the Miaoshan story in China, the popular hagiography of Bodhisattva Guanyin that gained wide circulation in Buddhist communities during this period. Although this narrative painting has already attracted scholarly attention, many questions concerning its origins and meaning remain unresolved. Through a comparison with the earliest extant textual variants of the Baojuan of Xiangshan (香山寶卷, reprinted editions of 1772 and 1773), this paper demonstrates the distinctive features of the Xinjin mural. It further situates the mural within the broader history of visual representations of the Miaoshan story from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that survive in Sichuan and Beijing. This case study reveals the significant influence of vernacular narrative traditions on Buddhist art during the Ming dynasty, while also showing that the Xinjin mural represents an independent version of the Miaoshan narrative that was not preserved in later written sources. Full article