Optimizing active surveillance strategies to balance the competing goals of early detection of grade progression and minimizing harm from biopsies.

BACKGROUND: Active surveillance (AS) for prostate cancer includes follow-up with serial prostate biopsies. The optimal biopsy frequency during follow-up has not been determined. The goal of this investigation was to use longitudinal AS biopsy data to assess whether the frequency of biopsy could be reduced without substantially prolonging the time to the detection of disease with a Gleason score ≥ 7. METHODS: With data from 1375 men with low-risk prostate cancer enrolled in AS at Johns Hopkins, a hidden Markov model was developed to estimate the probability of undersampling at diagnosis, the annual probability of grade progression, and the 10-year cumulative probability of reclassification or progression to Gleason score ≥ 7. It simulated 1024 potential AS biopsy strategies for the 10 years after diagnosis. For each of these strategies, the model predicted the mean delay in the detection of disease with a Gleason score ≥ 7. RESULTS: The model estimated the 10-year cumulative probability of reclassification from a Gleason score of 6 to a Gleason score ≥ 7 to be 40.0%. The probability of undersampling at diagnosis was 9.8%, and the annual progression probability for men with a Gleason score of 6 was 4.0%. On the basis of these estimates, a simulation of an annual biopsy strategy estimated the mean time to the detection of disease with a Gleason score ≥ 7 to be 14.1 months; however, several strategies eliminated biopsies with only small delays (<12 months) in detecting grade progression. CONCLUSIONS: Although annual biopsy for low-risk men on AS is associated with the shortest time to the detection of disease with a Gleason score ≥ 7, several alternative strategies may allow less frequent biopsying without sizable delays in detecting grade progression. Cancer 2018;124:698-705. © 2017 American Cancer Society.

Determination of the 3'UTR region of HLA-B*53:01:03 sequence by next generation sequencing.

The 3'UTR of the HLA-B*53:01:03 allele has been determined by next generation sequencing.

Characterization of the novel HLA-DQB1*03:516 allele by next-generation sequencing.

HLA-DQB1*03:516 differs from DQB1*03:03:02:03 by one nucleotide substitution at position 197G>A in exon 2.

Impacts of composting duration on physicochemical properties and microbial communities during short-term composting for the substrate for oyster mushrooms.

A short-term composting process to prepare substrate is an effective way to cultivate oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus spp.), which can increase the yield of mushrooms and lower the rate of contamination in non-industrialized cultivation. Moreover, it is different from the traditional composting processes for fertilizers and lacks systematic study, such as microbial succession and compost quality. In this study, a series of different tests of composting duration (0, 2, 4 and 5 d) were performed. A composting duration of 4-5 d over 58 °C was suitable for mushroom cultivation based on the biological efficiency (BE) range of 69.76-73.41 % and the contamination rate of 0 %. The content of total carbon (TC) continuously decreased during composting, while the content of total nitrogen (TN) reacted in an opposite matter. The final TN and C/N ratios were 1.89 % and 28/1, respectively, which fell well within the optimal range of nutritional requirements for oyster mushroom cultivation. The composting bacteria were more diverse than the fungal species. Caldibacillus, Thermobispora, Thermopolyspora, Thermobacillus and Ureibacillus were the predominant bacterial genera during the thermophilic stage. Co-occurrence patterns of microbial communities and physicochemical properties were performed using a network analysis, which indicated that bacteria can play more efficient roles than fungi in the degradation of organic matter. The structural equation model showed that composting duration significantly affected bacterial diversity, lignocellulose degradation rates, and BE. The correlations between bioinformatics parameters with composting characters and agronomic traits were determined by the Mantel test and showed that the induction of bacterial diversity over time rapidly activated carbon metabolism during short-term composting. This study provides a new idea of agro-waste composting for mushroom cultivation.

Fuzzy adaptive fault diagnosis and compensation for variable structure hypersonic vehicle with multiple faults.

Based on the type-II fuzzy logic, this paper proposes a robust adaptive fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme for multisensor faults in the variable structure hypersonic vehicles with parameter uncertainties. Type-II fuzzy method approximates the original models while eliminating the parameter uncertainties. Hence the sensor faults are detected and isolated by the multiple output residuals and thresholds considering nonlinear approximation errors and disturbance. Based on the fuzzy adaptive augmented observer, the faults and disturbance are all estimated accurately by an improved proportional-differential part. Then a variable structure FTC scheme repairs the faults by the estimation, the fast-varying disturbance is considered in FTC scheme and is compensated by the control parameters designed based on its derivative function, thereby enhancing the output robust tracking accuracy of the variable structure hypersonic vehicles. The Lyapunov theory proves the system robust stability, semi-physical simulation verifies the validity of the proposed method and the superiority compared with the traditional method.

Retraction: Analysis of risk factors and countermeasures of sepsis-associated encephalopathy.

The paper entitled "Analysis of risk factors and countermeasures of sepsis-associated encephalopathy" by YU et al., which was published online on October 15, 2021, has been withdrawn by the Publisher upon request by the authors. Their recent studies found that some data used in this paper could not be replicated in their latest studies and, as a result, they now have doubts about the accuracy of the published results.

Genome-Wide Association Identifies Risk Pathways for SAPHO Syndrome.

SAPHO syndrome is a rare chronic inflammatory disease which is characterized by the comprehensive manifestations of bone, joint, and skin. However, little is known about the pathogenesis of SAPHO syndrome. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 49 patients and 121 control subjects have primarily focused on identification of common genetic variants associated with SAPHO, the data were analyzed by classical multiple logistic regression. Later, GWAS findings were further validated using whole exome sequencing (WES) in 16 patients and 15 controls to identify potentially functional pathways involved in SAPHO pathogenesis. In general, 40588 SNPs in genomic regions were associated with P < 0.05 after filter process, only 9 SNPs meet the expected cut-off P-value, however, none of them had association with SAPHO syndrome based on published literatures. And then, 15 pathways were found involved in SAPHO pathogenesis, of them, 6 pathways including osteoclast differentiation, bacterial invasion of epithelial cells, et al., had strong association with skin, osteoarticular manifestations of SAPHO or inflammatory reaction based published research. This study identified aberrant osteoclast differentiation and other pathways were involved in SAPHO syndrome. This finding may give insight into the understanding of pathogenic genes of SAPHO and provide the basis for SAPHO research and treatment.

Succession of the microbial communities and function prediction during short-term peach sawdust-based composting.

Short-term composting of raw materials for preparing oyster mushroom cultivation media is widely used in China, and its microbial mechanism needs to be further studied. 11-days' peach sawdust-based composting was performed to evaluate material conversion and microbial succession using physicochemical analysis and 16S rRNA and ITS sequencing. Composting bacteria demonstrated much higher abundance than fungi. Firmicutes, Actinobacteriota, and Proteobacteria were the dominant bacterial phyla, while most of fungal species belonged to Ascomycota. Moisture was the key factor at the beginning, while total nitrogen, temperature, and lignin became main influencing factors for composting maturity. Actinobacteriota, Firmicutes, and Proteobacteria of bacterial phyla, Eurotiomycetes and Sordariomycetes of fungal classes involved in lignocellulosic degradation. Bacterial function prediction analysis showed that carbohydrate metabolism and amino acid metabolism were the main metabolic pathways. These results confer a better understanding of material and microbial succession during short-term composting and also provide valuable utilization in mushroom industry.