SEU2-Net: multi-scale U2-Net with SE attention mechanism for liver occupying lesion CT image segmentation.

Liver occupying lesions can profoundly impact an individual's health and well-being. To assist physicians in the diagnosis and treatment of abnormal areas in the liver, we propose a novel network named SEU2-Net by introducing the channel attention mechanism into U2-Net for accurate and automatic liver occupying lesion segmentation. We design the Residual U-block with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE-RSU), which is to add the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention mechanism at the residual connections of the Residual U-blocks (RSU, the component unit of U2-Net). SEU2-Net not only retains the advantages of U2-Net in capturing contextual information at multiple scales, but can also adaptively recalibrate channel feature responses to emphasize useful feature information according to the channel attention mechanism. In addition, we present a new abdominal CT dataset for liver occupying lesion segmentation from Peking University First Hospital's clinical data (PUFH dataset). We evaluate the proposed method and compare it with eight deep learning networks on the PUFH and the Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge (LiTS) datasets. The experimental results show that SEU2-Net has state-of-the-art performance and good robustness in liver occupying lesions segmentation.

MicroRNA-219-5p Represses the Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Gastric Cancer Cells by Targeting the LRH-1/Wnt/ß-Catenin Signaling Pathway.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are reportedly involved in gastric cancer development and progression. In particular, miR-219-5p has been reported to be a tumor-associated miRNA in human cancer. However, the role of miR-219-5p in gastric cancer remains unclear. In this study, we investigated for the first time the potential role and underlying mechanism of miR-219-5p in the proliferation, migration, and invasion of human gastric cancer cells. miR-219-5p was found to be markedly decreased in gastric cancer tissues and cell lines compared with adjacent tissues and normal gastric epithelial cells. miR-219-5p mimics or anti-miR-219-5p was transfected into gastric cancer cell lines to overexpress or suppress miR-219-5p expression, respectively. Results showed that miR-219-5p overexpression significantly decreased the proliferation, migration, and invasion of gastric cancer cells. Conversely, miR-219-5p suppression demonstrated a completely opposite effect. Bioinformatics and luciferase reporter assays indicated that miR-219-5p targeted the 3'-untranslated region of the liver receptor homolog-1 (LRH-1), a well-characterized oncogene. Furthermore, miR-219-5p inhibited the mRNA and protein levels of LRH-1. LRH-1 mRNA expression was inversely correlated with miR-219-5p expression in gastric cancer tissues. miR-219-5p overexpression significantly decreased the Wnt/ß-catenin signaling pathway in gastric cancer cells. Additionally, LRH-1 restoration can markedly reverse miR-219-5p-mediated tumor suppressive effects. Our study suggests that miR-219-5p regulated the proliferation, migration, and invasion of human gastric cancer cells by suppressing LRH-1. miR-219-5p may be a potential target for gastric cancer therapy.