Prioritizing prognostic-associated subpopulations and individualized recurrence risk signatures from single-cell transcriptomes of colorectal cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common gastrointestinal malignancies. There are few recurrence risk signatures for CRC patients. Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides a high-resolution platform for prognostic signature detection. However, scRNA-seq is not practical in large cohorts due to its high cost and most single-cell experiments lack clinical phenotype information. Few studies have been reported to use external bulk transcriptome with survival time to guide the detection of key cell subtypes in scRNA-seq data. We proposed scRankXMBD, a computational framework to prioritize prognostic-associated cell subpopulations based on within-cell relative expression orderings of gene pairs from single-cell transcriptomes. scRankXMBD achieves higher precision and concordance compared with five existing methods. Moreover, we developed single-cell gene pair signatures to predict recurrence risk for patients individually. Our work facilitates the application of the rank-based method in scRNA-seq data for prognostic biomarker discovery and precision oncology. scRankXMBD is available at https://github.com/xmuyulab/scRank-XMBD. (XMBD:Xiamen Big Data, a biomedical open software initiative in the National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University, China.).

A Novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network Combining Global Feature Extraction and Detailed Feature Extraction for Bearing Compound Fault Diagnosis.

This study researched the application of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to a bearing compound fault diagnosis. The proposed idea lies in the ability of CNN to automatically extract fault features from complex raw signals. In our approach, to extract more effective features from a raw signal, a novel deep convolutional neural network combining global feature extraction with detailed feature extraction (GDDCNN) is proposed. First, wide and small kernel sizes are separately adopted in shallow and deep convolutional layers to extract global and detailed features. Then, the modified activation layer with a concatenated rectified linear unit (CReLU) is added following the shallow convolution layer to improve the utilization of shallow global features of the network. Finally, to acquire more robust features, another strategy involving the GMP layer is utilized, which replaces the traditional fully connected layer. The performance of the obtained diagnosis was validated on two bearing datasets. The results show that the accuracy of the compound fault diagnosis is over 98%. Compared with three other CNN-based methods, the proposed model demonstrates better stability.

Influence of Seamless Patient-Centered Care on Efficiency, Satisfaction, and Patient Awareness in Imaging Departments: A Prospective Cohort Study

Aims: This study aimed to enhance the existing nursing model in imaging departments by implementing a characteristic seamless nursing care approach and assessing its impact on patient and medical staff satisfaction, nursing quality, examination efficiency, and patient awareness. We hypothesized that the implementation of a seamless nursing care model would be associated with higher patient satisfaction, improved nursing quality, increased examination efficiency, and better patient awareness compared to the traditional nursing model. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This prospective cohort study included 300 patients undergoing imaging examinations from January 2019 to January 2022. Subjects were divided into control and observation groups (n=150 each) based on different nursing methods. The control group received routine care, and the observation group received seamless care. The following outcome measures were assessed using validated questionnaires: patient satisfaction (measured using a 5-point Likert scale), medical staff satisfaction with patient examination cooperation (measured using a 5-point Likert scale), nursing quality compliance rate (percentage of nursing tasks performed according to established guidelines), dissatisfaction rate (percentage expressing dissatisfaction with examination cooperation), and effect evaluation [measured using a knowledge test validated in previous studies (Chung et al., 2020) with a total score range of 0-20]. RESULTS: Average imaging examination and nursing times were significantly lower in the observation group compared to the control group (P<0.05). The examination cooperation dissatisfaction rate was significantly lower in the observation group (P<0.05). There were significant differences in examination precautions, procedures, breathing training methods, and injection comparisons between the groups (all P<0.05). CONCLUSION: The application of seamless nursing care may be associated with improved patient satisfaction, nursing service quality, imaging examination efficiency, and patient awareness of imaging examinations. However, further research is needed to establish causal relationships.

Tracing unknown tumor origins with a biological-pathway-based transformer model.

Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) represents metastatic cancer where the primary site remains unidentified despite standard diagnostic procedures. To determine the tumor origin in such cases, we developed BPformer, a deep learning method integrating the transformer model with prior knowledge of biological pathways. Trained on transcriptomes from 10,410 primary tumors across 32 cancer types, BPformer achieved remarkable accuracy rates of 94%, 92%, and 89% in primary tumors and primary and metastatic sites of metastatic tumors, respectively, surpassing existing methods. Additionally, BPformer was validated in a retrospective study, demonstrating consistency with tumor sites diagnosed through immunohistochemistry and histopathology. Furthermore, BPformer was able to rank pathways based on their contribution to tumor origin identification, which helped to classify oncogenic signaling pathways into those that are highly conservative among different cancers versus those that are highly variable depending on their origins.

SIMarker: Cellular similarity detection and its application to diagnosis and prognosis of liver cancer.

BACKGROUND: The emergence of single-cell technology offers a unique opportunity to explore cellular similarity and heterogeneity between precancerous diseases and solid tumors. However, there is lacking a systematic study for identifying and characterizing similarities at single-cell resolution. METHODS: We developed SIMarker, a computational framework to detect cellular similarities between precancerous diseases and solid tumors based on gene expression at single-cell resolution. Taking hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as a case study, we quantified the cellular and molecular connections between HCC and cirrhosis. Core analysis modules of SIMarker is publicly available at https://github.com/xmuhuanglab/SIMarker ("SIM" means "similarity" and "Marker" means "biomarkers). RESULTS: We found PGA5+ hepatocytes in HCC showed cirrhosis-like characteristics, including similar transcriptional programs and gene regulatory networks. Consequently, the genes constituting the gene expression program of these cirrhosis-like subpopulations were designated as cirrhosis-like signatures (CLS). Strikingly, our utilization of CLS enabled the development of diagnosis and prognosis biomarkers based on within-sample relative expression orderings of gene pairs. These biomarkers achieved high precision and concordance compared with previous studies. CONCLUSIONS: Our work provides a systematic method to investigate the clinical translational significance of cellular similarities between HCC and cirrhosis, which opens avenues for identifying similar paradigms in other categories of cancers and diseases.

Heteroaggregation, disaggregation, and migration of nanoplastics with nanosized activated carbon in aquatic environments: Effects of particle property, water chemistry, and hydrodynamic condition.

Nanosized activated carbon (NAC) as emerging engineered nanomaterials may interact with nanoplastics prevalent in aquatic environments to affect their fate and transport. This study investigated the effects of particle property (charge and concentration), water chemistry [electrolytes, pH, humic acid (HA), and sodium alginate (SA)], and hydrodynamic condition [wave (i.e., sonication) and turbulence (i.e., stirring)] on the heteroaggregation, disaggregation, and migration of NAC with positively charged amino-modified polystyrene (APS) or negatively charged bare polystyrene (BPS) nanoplastics. The homoaggregation rate of APS was slower than its heteroaggregation rate with NAC, with critical coagulation concentrations (CCC) decreasing at higher NAC concentrations. However, the homoaggregation rate of BPS was intermediate between its heteroaggregation rates under low (10 mg/L) and high (40 mg/L) NAC concentrations. The heteroaggregation rate of APS+NAC enhanced as pH increasing from 3 to 10, whereas the opposite trend was observed for BPS+NAC. In NaCl solution or at CaCl2 concentration below 2.5 mM, HA stabilized APS+NAC and BPS+NAC via steric hindrance more effectively than SA. Above 2.5 mM CaCl2, SA destabilized APS+NAC and BPS+NAC by calcium bridging more strongly than HA. The migration process of heteroaggregates was simulated in nearshore environments. The simulation suggests that without hydrodynamic disturbance, APS+NAC (971 m) may travel farther than BPS+NAC (901 m). Mild wave (30-s sonication) and intense turbulence (1500-rpm stirring) could induce disaggregation of heteroaggregates, thus potentially extending the migration distances of APS+NAC and BPS+NAC to 1611 and 2160 m, respectively. Conversely, intense wave (20-min sonication) and mild turbulence (150-rpm stirring) may further promote aggregation of heteroaggregates, shortening the migration distances of APS+NAC and BPS+NAC to 262 and 552 m, respectively. Particle interactions mainly involved van der Waals attraction, electrostatic repulsion, steric hindrance, calcium bridging, π-π interactions, hydrogen bonding, and hydrophobic interactions. These findings highlight the important influence of NAC on the fate, transport, and risks of nanoplastics in aquatic environments.

C2BA-UNet: A context-coordination multi-atlas boundary-aware UNet-like method for PET/CT images based tumor segmentation.

Tumor segmentation is a necessary step in clinical processing that can help doctors diagnose tumors and plan surgical treatments. Since tumors are usually small, the locations and appearances vary substantially across individuals, and the contrast between tumors and adjacent normal tissues is low, tumor segmentation is still a challenging task. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved good results in tumor segmentation, the information about tumor boundaries has been rarely explored. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a new method for automatic tumor segmentation in PET/CT images based on context-coordination and boundary-aware, termed as C2BA-UNet. We employ a UNet-like backbone network and replace the encoder with EfficientNet-B0 for efficiency. To acquire potential tumor boundaries, we propose a new multi-atlas boundary-aware (MABA) module based on gradient atlas, uncertainty atlas, and level set atlas, that focuses on uncertain regions between tumors and adjacent tissues. Furthermore, we propose a new context coordination module (CCM) to combine multi-scale context information with attention mechanism to optimize skip connection in high-level layers. To validate the superiority of our method, we conduct experiments on a publicly available soft tissue sarcoma (STS) dataset and a lymphoma dataset, and the results show our method is competitive with other comparison methods.

Predicting heart failure in-hospital mortality by integrating longitudinal and category data in electronic health records.

Heart failure is a life-threatening syndrome that is diagnosed in 3.6 million people worldwide each year. We propose a deep fusion learning model (DFL-IMP) that uses time series and category data from electronic health records to predict in-hospital mortality in patients with heart failure. We considered 41 time series features (platelets, white blood cells, urea nitrogen, etc.) and 17 category features (gender, insurance, marital status, etc.) as predictors, all of which were available within the time of the patient's last hospitalization, and a total of 7696 patients participated in the observational study. Our model was evaluated against different time windows. The best performance was achieved with an AUC of 0.914 when the observation window was 5 days and the prediction window was 30 days. Outperformed other baseline models including LR (0.708), RF (0.717), SVM (0.675), LSTM (0.757), GRU (0.759), GRU-U (0.766) and MTSSP (0.770). This tool allows us to predict the expected pathway of heart failure patients and intervene early in the treatment process, which has significant implications for improving the life expectancy of heart failure patients.

A review of deep learning-based multiple-lesion recognition from medical images: classification, detection and segmentation.

Deep learning-based methods have become the dominant methodology in medical image processing with the advancement of deep learning in natural image classification, detection, and segmentation. Deep learning-based approaches have proven to be quite effective in single lesion recognition and segmentation. Multiple-lesion recognition is more difficult than single-lesion recognition due to the little variation between lesions or the too wide range of lesions involved. Several studies have recently explored deep learning-based algorithms to solve the multiple-lesion recognition challenge. This paper includes an in-depth overview and analysis of deep learning-based methods for multiple-lesion recognition developed in recent years, including multiple-lesion recognition in diverse body areas and recognition of whole-body multiple diseases. We discuss the challenges that still persist in the multiple-lesion recognition tasks by critically assessing these efforts. Finally, we outline existing problems and potential future research areas, with the hope that this review will help researchers in developing future approaches that will drive additional advances.

Factors Influencing Users' Perceived Restoration While Using Treetop Trails: The Case of the Fu and Jinjishan Forest Trails, Fuzhou, China.

Studies have indicated that urban greenways promote physical and perceived restoration. However, there is a lack of research on the impact of treetop trails on human perceived restoration. In this study, two representative treetop trails in Fuzhou city were selected to investigate treetop trails' impact on users' perceived restoration. The study adopted a structural equation modelling approach to explore the influence mechanisms and pathways of treetop trails on users' perceived restoration, through 412 questionnaires. The results showed that the perceived environmental quality of treetop trails had a significant positive effect on users' overall psychological wellbeing. Place attachment had a significant positive effect on users' perceived restoration and a significant mediating effect on users' perceived environmental quality of trails. The results of this study revealed that the mechanisms of the impact of treetop trails on users' perceived restoration and the construction of treetop trails can be enhanced in the future by improving trail facilities, enriching trail perception of elevated feeling, improving trail landscape quality, and optimising trail design.

Colloidal stability of nanosized activated carbon in aquatic systems: Effects of pH, electrolytes, and macromolecules.

Nanosized activated carbon (NAC) is a novel adsorbent with great potential for water reclamation. However, its transport and reactivity in aqueous environments may be greatly affected by its stability against aggregation. This study investigated the colloidal stability of NAC in model aqueous systems with broad background solution chemistries including 7 electrolytes (NaCl, NaNO3, Na2SO4, KCl, CaCl2, MgCl2, and BaCl2), pH 4-9, and 6 macromolecules (humic acid (HA), fulvic acid (FA), cellulose (CEL), bovine serum albumin (BSA), alginate (ALG), and extracellular polymeric substance (EPS)), along with natural water samples collected from pristine to polluted rivers. The results showed that higher solution pH stabilized NAC by raising the critical coagulation concentration from 28 to 590 mM NaCl. Increased cation concentration destabilized NAC by charge screening, with the cationic influence following Ba2+ > Ca2+ > Mg2+ >> Na+ > K+. Its aggregation behavior could be predicted with the Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory with a Hamaker constant (ACWC) of 4.3 × 10-20 J. The presence of macromolecules stabilized NAC in NaCl solution and most CaCl2 solution following EPS > BSA > CEL > HA > FA > ALG, due largely to enhanced electrical repulsion and steric hindrance originated from adsorbed macromolecules. However, ALG and HA strongly destabilized NAC via cation bridging at high Ca2+ concentrations. Approximately half of NAC particles remained stably suspended for ∼10 d in neutral freshwater samples. The results demonstrated the complex effects of water chemistry on fate and transport of NAC in aquatic environments.