Bismuth selenide nanoparticles enhance radiation sensitivity in colon cancer cells in-vitro.

Background: Radiotherapy is one of the primary treatments for cancer, but it can cause damage to normal tissues and lead to side effects. The use of radiosensitizers can enhance the sensitivity of cancer cells to radiation, thereby reducing the amount of radiation required and minimizing damage to healthy tissues. Bismuth selenide nanoparticles (Bi2Se3 NPs) have been shown to have potential as radiosensitizers. Materials and methods: In this study, we investigated the potential of Bi2Se3 NPs as a radiosensitizer in colon cancer cells (HCT-116) in vitro. The cells were treated with various concentrations of Bi2Se3 NPs and then exposed to ionizing radiation. The viability of the cells was assessed using the MTT assay, and the survival rate was evaluated. Results: Our results showed that Bi2Se3 NPs significantly enhanced the sensitivity of colon cancer cells to ionizing radiation in a dose-dependent manner. The combination of Bi2Se3 NPs and radiation resulted in a significant decrease in cell viability and survival rate compared to radiation alone. Conclusion: Bi2Se3 NPs have the potential to be used as a radiosensitizer in the treatment of colon cancer. The findings of this study suggest that combining Bi2Se3 NPs with radiation may enhance the effectiveness of radiotherapy and reduce the mortality rate associated with colon cancer. Further studies are needed to investigate the safety and efficacy of this approach in vivo.

Radioprotective effect of Malva sylvestris L. against radiation-induced liver, kidney and intestine damages in rat: A histopathological study.

Background: Ionizing radiation (IR) is widely used in the treatment of cancer in radiotherapy. One of the main concerns of patients with gastrointestinal cancers undergoing radiotherapy is the harmful side effects of IR on normal tissues. The liver, kidney, and duodenum are usually exposed to high doses of radiation in the treatment of some cancers in abdominal region radiotherapy. We aimed to assess the radioprotective effects of Malva sylvestris L. against IR damages to the abdominal region. Materials and methods: This current study was conducted on 45 rats divided randomly into nine groups of five: A) negative control group, B) sham group, C) irradiation group, D) mallow treatment-1(200gr/kg), E) mallow treatment-2(400gr/kg), F) mallow treatment-3(600gr/kg), G) mallow treatment-4(200gr/kg) plus irradiation, H) mallow treatment-5(400gr/kg) plus irradiation, I) mallow treatment-6(600gr/kg) plus irradiation. Irradiation was performed with a 6Gy x-ray. Histopathological evaluations were performed 10 days after irradiation. Results: The histopathological examination results confirmed that preventive therapy with the effective dose of mallow reduced the liver, kidney, and intestine damage induced by radiation. The dose of 400 mg/kg was more effective than other selected dose in improving the damage caused by irradiation in the studied tissues. Conclusion: This study concludes that Malva sylvestris L. contributed to significant improvements in radiation-induced histological parameters of the liver and kidney and, to a lesser extent, in the intestine. These results collectively indicate that mallow is an effective radioprotective agent.

Gold nanoparticles induce apoptosis in HCT-116 colon cancer cell line.

INTRODUCTION: This study aimed to investigate the apoptotic and anti-cancer effect of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) on apoptosis in HCT-116 colon cancer cells. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The level of ROS and apoptosis were determined by fluorimetric method and flow cytometry and Hoechst 33,258 staining, respectively. Furthermore, the mRNA expression of Bax, Bcl-2, CCNB1, P53 genes was evaluated by qRT-PCR method in HCT116 cells. RESULTS: The experimental results of this study showed that treatment with nanoparticles led to a significant increase in expression of Bax, P53 genes and a significant decrease in the expression of Bcl-2, CCNB1 genes at concentrations of 25 and 50 µg/ml during 48 h of incubation, compared to control cells (p < 0.05). The flow cytometric results (Annexin-pI) and Hoechst 33,258 staining also showed a significant increase in the level of apoptosis in the treated cells, depending on the concentration and time. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study showed that AuNPs cause apoptosis at the half-maximal inhibitory concentration in the HCT-116 tumor cells during 48 h of incubation.

Automatic microscopic diagnosis of diseases using an improved UNet++ architecture.

Anthrax is a severe infectious disease caused by the Bacillus anthracis bacterium. This paper aims to design and implement a fast and reliable system based on microscopic image processing of patient tissue samples for the automatic diagnosis of anthrax and other tissues diseases, metastasis detection, patient prognosis, etc. An improved UNet++ architecture is proposed to segment microscopic images of patient tissue samples. The proposed model combines multi-scale features by adding skip connections in two paths; the forward path from the encoder to the decoder and the decoder path to the output. These new connections improve the performance of the UNet++. Integration of the squeeze and excitation-inception blocks in the new skip connections provides the network with features at different scales with different kernel sizes. Several convolutional networks are used as the backbone to extract powerful representations in the encoder section. The use of batch normalization, dropout technique, and LRelu activation function in this model accelerates convergence and increases the generalization power of the model. To overcome the problem of data imbalance of different classes, a weighted hybrid loss function is proposed, which further improved segmentation efficiency. The semantic segmentation results are converted to the instance segmentation using the marker-based watershed algorithm. Experimental results show that despite many challenges of microscopic image analysis, the proposed model is a reliable system for the automatic diagnosis of anthrax and other tissues diseases. It produces better results than state-of-the-art architectures.

Investigation of the gold nanoparticles effects on the prostate dose distribution in brachytherapy: gel dosimetry and Monte Carlo method.

PURPOSE: In this work, gold nanoparticles (GNPs) were embedded in the MAGIC-f polymer gel irradiated with the 192Ir brachytherapy sources. MATERIAL AND METHODS: At the first plexiglas phantom was made as the human pelvis. The GNPs were synthesized with 15 nm in diameter and 0.1 mM (0.0197 mg/ml) in concentration by using a chemical reduction method. Then, the MAGIC-f gel was synthesized. The fabricated gel was poured into the tubes located at the prostate (with and without the GNPs) locations of the phantom. The phantom was irradiated with 192Ir brachytherapy sources for prostate cancer. After 24 hours, the irradiated gels was read by using Siemens 1.5 Tesla MRI scanner. Following the brachytherapy practices, the absolute doses at the reference points and isodose curves were extracted and compared by experimental measurements and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. RESULTS: The mean absorbed doses in the presence of the GNPs in prostate were 14% higher than the corresponding values without the GNPs in the brachytherapy. The gamma index analysis (between gel and MC) using 7%/7 mm was also applied to the data and a high pass rate achieved (91.7% and 86.4% for analysis with/without GNPs, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The real three-dimensional analysis shows the comparison of the dose-volume histograms measured for planning volumes and the expected one from the MC calculation. The results indicate that the polymer gel dosimetry method, which developed and used in this study, could be recommended as a reliable method for investigating the dose enhancement factor of GNPs in brachytherapy.