Long-Term Survival in Patients with Cancers: Surveillance, epidemiology and end results-based analysis.

Objectives: This study aimed to explore real-world data on the long-term survival of cancer patients using historical records from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Programme. Long-term survival is an important endpoint in the management of different malignancies. It is rarely assessed due to the unfeasibility of follow-up for a long duration of time. Besides reporting the five-year relative survival, the 10- and 20-year survival rates for different types of cancers were analysed. Additionally, survival trends as a function of time, age and tumour type were reviewed and reported. Methods: The study used SEER*Stat (Version 8.3.6.1) for data acquisition from the SEER 9 Regs (November 2019) database. Data from patients diagnosed with cancer between 1975 and 2014 were retrieved and included in the analysis. Results: For patients diagnosed with any malignant disease (N = 4,412,024), there was a significant increase in median overall survival over time (P <0.001). The 20-, 10-, and 5-year survival rates were higher in solid tumours compared to haematological malignancies (50.8% versus 38%; 57% versus 47.4%; and 62.2% versus 57.4%, respectively). The highest 20-year relative survival rates were observed in thyroid cancer (95.2%), germ cell and trophoblastic neoplasms (90.3%), melanoma (86.8%), Wilms' tumour (86.2%) and prostate cancer (83.5%). Conclusion: Long-term follow-up data were suggestive of high 20-year relative survival rates for most tumour types. Relative survival showed an improving trend over time, especially in solid tumours.

Structured crowdsourcing enables convolutional segmentation of histology images.

MOTIVATION: While deep-learning algorithms have demonstrated outstanding performance in semantic image segmentation tasks, large annotation datasets are needed to create accurate models. Annotation of histology images is challenging due to the effort and experience required to carefully delineate tissue structures, and difficulties related to sharing and markup of whole-slide images. RESULTS: We recruited 25 participants, ranging in experience from senior pathologists to medical students, to delineate tissue regions in 151 breast cancer slides using the Digital Slide Archive. Inter-participant discordance was systematically evaluated, revealing low discordance for tumor and stroma, and higher discordance for more subjectively defined or rare tissue classes. Feedback provided by senior participants enabled the generation and curation of 20 000+ annotated tissue regions. Fully convolutional networks trained using these annotations were highly accurate (mean AUC=0.945), and the scale of annotation data provided notable improvements in image classification accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Dataset is freely available at: https://goo.gl/cNM4EL. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Mucous Membrane Grafting Augmented with Topical Mitomycin C Application in Contracted Socket Repair Surgeries.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the use of intraoperative topical application of mitomycin C (MMC) for managing cases of recurrent socket contraction. METHODS: A prospective comparative randomized study was carried out on 40 patients suffering from contracted sockets. They were randomly enrolled into 2 groups. Group A included 20 patients who had a surgery to treat contracted socket without augmentation with MMC. Group B patients had an MMC-augmented repair for the contracted socket. Patients were followed up over a period of 12 months for changes in inferior fornix (IF) depth and ability to retain the ocular prosthesis. RESULTS: At the end of the follow-up period, postoperative IF depth was significantly deeper in group B (with MMC) than in group A (without MMC). As well, 75% of the patients in group B could maintain the prosthetic eye shell, whereas only 35% of group A could maintain the prosthesis. CONCLUSION: This study shows that using intraoperative MMC (0.2 mg/mL) in contracted socket reconstruction plays a significant role in maintaining prosthetic eye. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to use MMC on a relatively large scale of patients with contracted socket. However, the follow-up period was relatively short and further work is required to verify the effect of MMC on a longer follow-up period.