Effects of esketamine on postoperative fatigue syndrome in patients after laparoscopic resection of gastric carcinoma: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Despite the implementation of various postoperative management strategies, the prevalence of postoperative fatigue syndrome (POFS) remains considerable among individuals undergoing laparoscopic radical gastrectomy. While the N-methyl-D-aspartic acid receptor antagonist esketamine has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing sleep quality and alleviating postoperative pain, its impact on POFS remains uncertain. Consequently, the objective of this study is to ascertain whether perioperative administration of esketamine can effectively mitigate the occurrence of POFS in patients undergoing laparoscopic radical gastrectomy. METHODS: A total of 133 patients diagnosed with gastric cancer were randomly assigned to two groups, namely the control group (Group C) (n = 66) and the esketamine group (Group E) (n = 67), using a double-blind method. The Group C received standardized anesthesia, while the Group E received esketamine in addition to the standardized anesthesia. The primary outcome measure assessed was the Christensen fatigue score at 3 days after the surgical procedure, while the secondary outcomes included the disparities in postoperative fatigue, postoperative pain, sleep quality, and adverse reactions between the two groups. RESULTS: In the group receiving esketamine, the fatigue scores of Christensen on the third day after surgery were significantly lower compared to the Group C (estimated difference, -0.70; 95% CI, -1.37 to -0.03; P = 0.040). Additionally, there was a significant decrease in the occurrence of fatigue in the Group E compared to the Group C on the first and third days following surgery (P < 0.05). Also, compared to individuals who had distal gastrectomy, those who had entire gastrectomy demonstrated a higher degree of postoperative tiredness reduction with esketamine. Furthermore, the Group E exhibited reduced postoperative pain and improved sleep in comparison to the Group C. Both groups experienced similar rates of adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: The use of esketamine during the perioperative period can improve POFS after laparoscopic radical gastrectomy, without adverse reactions. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered in the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR2300072167) on 05/06 /2023.

Progresses, Challenges, and Prospects of CRISPR/Cas9 Gene-Editing in Glioma Studies.

Glioma refers to a tumor that is derived from brain glial stem cells or progenitor cells and is the most common primary intracranial tumor. Due to its complex cellular components, as well as the aggressiveness and specificity of the pathogenic site of glioma, most patients with malignant glioma have poor prognoses following surgeries, radiotherapies, and chemotherapies. In recent years, an increasing amount of research has focused on the use of CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology in the treatment of glioma. As an emerging gene-editing technology, CRISPR/Cas9 utilizes the expression of certain functional proteins to repair tissues or treat gene-deficient diseases and could be applied to immunotherapies through the expression of antigens, antibodies, or receptors. In addition, some research also utilized CRISPR/Cas9 to establish tumor models so as to study tumor pathogenesis and screen tumor prognostic targets. This paper mainly discusses the roles of CRISPR/Cas9 in the treatment of glioma patients, the exploration of the pathogenesis of neuroglioma, and the screening targets for clinical prognosis. This paper also raises the future research prospects of CRISPR/Cas9 in glioma, as well as the opportunities and challenges that it will face in clinical treatment in the future.

Small Network for Lightweight Task in Computer Vision: A Pruning Method Based on Feature Representation.

Many current convolutional neural networks are hard to meet the practical application requirement because of the enormous network parameters. For accelerating the inference speed of networks, more and more attention has been paid to network compression. Network pruning is one of the most efficient and simplest ways to compress and speed up the networks. In this paper, a pruning algorithm for the lightweight task is proposed, and a pruning strategy based on feature representation is investigated. Different from other pruning approaches, the proposed strategy is guided by the practical task and eliminates the irrelevant filters in the network. After pruning, the network is compacted to a smaller size and is easy to recover accuracy with fine-tuning. The performance of the proposed pruning algorithm is validated on the acknowledged image datasets, and the experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm is more suitable to prune the irrelevant filters for the fine-tuning dataset.

Solid Mathematical Marbling.

Years of research have been devoted to computer-generated two-dimensional marbling. However, three-dimensional marbling has yet to be explored. In this paper, we present mathematical marbling of three-dimensional solids which supports a compact random-access vector representation. Our solid marbling textures are created by composing closed-form 3D pattern tool functions. These tool functions are an injection function and five deformation functions. The injection function is used to generate basic patterns, and the deformation functions are responsible for transforming the basic pattern into complex marbling effects. The resulting representation is feature preserving and resolution-independent. Our approach can render high-quality images preserving both the sharp features and the smooth color variations of a solid texture. When implemented on the GPU, our representation enables efficient color evaluation during the real-time solid marbling texture mapping. The color of a point in the volume space is computed by the 3D pattern tool functions from its coordinates. Our method consumes very little memory because only the mathematical functions and their corresponding parameters are stored. In addition, we develop an intuitive user interface and a genetic algorithm to facilitate the solid marbling texture authoring process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through various solid marbling textures and 3D objects carved from them.

Significance of heparanase in metastatic lymph nodes of cervical squamous cell cancer.

The aim of this study was to explore the expression of heparanase (HPA) in metastatic lymph nodes (LNs) of cervical cancer and to evaluate HPA as a marker of micro-metastasis of LNs. Immunohistochemistry was performed to detect the expression of HPA in 53 cases with metastasis of LNs (group A) and 49 cases without (group B). Scoring was determined based on the intensity of immunostaining and the size of the staining area. Three points or higher score was considered as positive. Among all cases, the positive rate of HPA was 76.5% in primary lesions and 84.9% in both primary lesions and metastatic LNs in group A. In group B, the rates were 67.3% in primary lesions and 8.2% in metastatic LNs. The expression of HPA in group A was significantly higher than that in group B (P<0.05). Compared with stage IA-IB and well-differentiated and non-metastatic LNs, the LNs of stage IIA and moderately/poorly differentiated and metastatic LNs expressed higher HPA (P<0.05). The overall 5-year survival rate was 73.3% and the median overall survival time (MOS) was 49.0 months. The MOS of the two groups was 36.0 and 58.5 months, respectively (P=0.023); the MOS of patients with positive HPA expression was distinctly lower than that of negative patients (P=0.040). Clinical staging, degree of differentiation, lymph node metastasis and expression of HPA notably affected patient prognosis; lymph node metastasis and expression of HPA were independent risk factors affecting patient prognosis (P<0.05). Our study demonstrated that high-level expression of HPA in cervical cancer was involved in LN metastasis, further impacting on patients' long-term survival. The clinical value of HPA requires further in-depth study.

Solid Mathematical Marbling.

Years of research have been devoted to computer-generated 2D marbling, whereas 3D marbling has yet to be explored. The proposed mathematical marbling of 3D solids supports a compact random-access vector representation, creating solid marbling textures by composing closed-form 3D pattern tool functions. The resulting representation is feature-preserving and resolution-independent, and it consumes very little memory. To facilitate the solid-marbling texture authoring process, the authors also developed an intuitive user interface and a genetic algorithm.

Analysis of the expression levels of survivin and VEGF in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between an inhibitor of apoptosis (survivin) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) prior to and following chemotherapy. Reverse transcription (RT)-PCR and western blotting were employed to analyze survivin and VEGF mRNA and protein expression. Moreover, the concentrations of survivin and VEGF were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Our data revealed that survivin and VEGF were overexpressed in patients with ALL prior to treatment, while survivin levels were significantly decreased following treatment. In addition, there was a positive correlation between survivin and VEGF concentrations in plasma. In conclusion, analysis of survivin and VEGF expression levels may improve the clinical diagnosis and treatment of ALL.

Mathematical marbling.

In this paper, the proposed method takes a mathematical approach with closed-form expressions to simulate marbling. This method improves control, ease of implementation, parallelism, and speed, enabling real-time visual feedback and creation of vivid flowing animations. Users can start designs from a blank sheet, raster images, or videos.