Plate augmentation and hybrid bone grafting are effective treatments for atrophic nonunion of the femur with the original intramedullary nail retained in situ.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of plate augmentation and hybrid bone grafting for treating atrophic nonunion of the femur with original intramedullary nail retained in situ.In this study, 36 patients with atrophic nonunion of the femur who underwent surgery using the technique of plate augmentation and a hybrid bone grafting while retaining the original intramedullary nail in situ in Xi'an Honghui Hospital from January 2019 to December 2021 were enrolled. 28 patients who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were ultimately included in the study. These 28 patients, consisting of 20 males and 8 females with a mean age of 38 years, were evaluated based on factors such as operation time, intraoperative blood loss, the average hospitalization days. Additionally, the results and function of these patients were evaluated by union time, Wu's scores of limb function and incidence of serious complications.All 28 patients achieved bone union at the 12 month follow-up, with an average follow-up time of 14.6 ± 4.2 months.The average operation time was 68.3 ± 11.2 min, and the average intraoperative blood loss was 140 ± 22.6 ml. Patients were hospitalized for an average of 5.8 ± 1.1 days. Full clinical and radiological bone union was achieved on average at 5.1 ± 1.9 months. The mean value of Wu's scores at the 12 month follow-up was significantly higher than before the operation. Limb function was excellent in 27 patients and good in one patient at the 12 month follow-up. However, five patients experienced the lower limb vein thrombosis, including one deep vein thrombosis and four lower limb intermuscular vein thromboses. One patient had a superficial infections of the surgical incision site, while three patients reported pain and numbness where their iliac bone graft was extracted at the 12 month follow-up. The technique of plate augmentation and hybrid bone grafting, combined with retaining the original intramedullary nail in situ has been shown to be a safe, effective, simply and standardizable practice for treating atrophic femoral nonunion with an intact original IMN fixation.

CEUS-based classification of liver tumors with deep canonical correlation analysis and multi-kernel learning.

The contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) has been a widely accepted imaging modality for diagnosis of liver cancers. In clinical practice, several typical images selected from enhancement patterns of the arterial, portal venous and late phases can provide reliable information basis for diagnosis. In this work, we propose to develop a CEUS-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for liver cancers with only three typical CEUS images selected from three phases, which simulates the clinical diagnosis mode of radiologists. In the proposed CAD, the deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA) is first performed on three CEUS pairs between arterial and portal venous phases, arterial and late phases, respectively, due to the effectiveness of multi-view fusion of DCCA. The generated six-view features are then fed to a multiple kernel learning (MKL) classifier to further promote the predictive diagnosis result. The experimental results indicate that the proposed DCCA-MKL algorithm achieves best performance for discriminating benign liver tumors from malignant liver cancers.

Histopathological image classification with bilinear convolutional neural networks.

The computer-aided quantitative analysis for histopathological images has attracted considerable attention. The stain decomposition on histopathological images is usually recommended to address the issue of co-localization or aliasing of tissue substances. Although the convolutional neural networks (CNN) is a popular deep learning algorithm for various tasks on histopathological image analysis, it is only directly performed on histopathological images without considering stain decomposition. The bilinear CNN (BCNN) is a new CNN model for fine-grained classification. BCNN consists of two CNNs, whose convolutional-layer outputs are multiplied with outer product at each spatial location. In this work, we propose a novel BCNN-based method for classification of histopathological images, which first decomposes histopathological images into hematoxylin and eosin stain components, and then perform BCNN on the decomposed images to fuse and improve the feature representation performance. The experimental results on the colorectal cancer histopathological image dataset with eight classes indicate that the proposed BCNN-based algorithm is superior to the traditional CNN.

Nucleus pulposus cells expressing hBMP7 can prevent the degeneration of allogenic IVD in a canine transplantation model.

We have previously explored the possibilities of allogenic intervertebral disc (IVD) curing disc degeneration disease in clinical practice. The results showed that the motion and stability of the spinal unit was preserved after transplantation of allogenic IVD in human beings at 5-year follow-up. However, mild degeneration was observed in the allogenic transplanted IVD cases. In this study, we construct the biological tissue engineering IVD by injecting the nucleus pulposus cells (NPCs) expressing human bone morphogenetic protein 7 (hBMP7) into cryopreserved IVD, and transplant the biological tissue engineering IVD into a beagle dog to investigate whether NPCs expressing hBMP7 could prevent the degeneration of the transplanted allogenic IVDs. At 24 weeks after transplantation, MRI scan showed that IVD allografts injected NPCs expressing hBMP7 have a slighter signs of degeneration than IVD allografts with NPCs or without NPCs. The range of motion of left-right rotation in the group without NPCs was bigger than that of two cells injection group. PKH-26-labeled cells were identified at IVD allograft. The study demonstrated that NPCs expressing hBMP7 could survive at least 24 weeks and prevent the degeneration of the transplanted IVD. This solution might have a potential role in preventing the IVD allograft degeneration in long time follow-up.