Effect of Preoperative Double-J Ureteral Stenting before Flexible Ureterorenoscopy on Stone-free Rates and Complications.

The effect of preoperative Double-J (DJ) ureteral stenting before flexible ureterorenoscopy (FURS) in the treatment for urinary stones was evaluated. We retrospectively enrolled 306 consecutive patients who underwent FURS from Jan. 2014 to Dec. 2017. All the patients were classified into two groups according to whether they had DJ ureteral stenting before FURS. Baseline characteristics (age, sex, stone location, stone size, surgical success rate, operation time, stone-free rate of the first day after surgery, stone-free rate of the first month after surgery, total complication rate) were compared using Chi-square test for categorical variables and Kruskal-Wallis test for continuous variables. In total, 306 patients were included in this study. The group of DJ stenting before FURS included 203 (66.3%) patients, and non-DJ stenting before FURS was observed in 103 (33.7%) patients. The group of DJ stenting before FURS was significantly associated with a shorter operation time (53.8 vs. 59.3 min, P<0.001), a higher stone-free rate of the first day after surgery (69.0% vs. 51.5%, P=0.003). However, statistical significant differences were not found in the age, sex, stone location, stone size, surgical success rate, stone-free rate of the first month after surgery (89.2% vs. 81.6%, P=0.065) and total complication rate (5.4% vs. 9.7%, P=0.161) between the two groups. Preoperative DJ ureteral stenting before FURS could reduce the operation time and increase stone-free rate of the first day after surgery. However, it might not benefit the stone-free rate of the first month after surgery and reduce the complication rate. Preoperative DJ stenting should be not routinely performed.

MiR-483-5p downregulation contributed to cell proliferation, metastasis, and inflammation of clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

Inflammation status are especially for tumor growth, and microRNAs (miRNAs) confirmed to participate in cancer occurrence and progression. However, the role of miR-483-5p and the relation with inflammation have not been elucidated in renal cell cancer (RCC). In this study, we intended to explore miR-483-5p expression and the relationship of inflammation status in clear cell renal cell cancer (ccRCC). Using microarray and qRT-PCR (Quantitative Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction), we investigated the miR-483-5p expression in plasma and ccRCC cancer tissues. Then, we analyzed the correlation of miR-483-5p with clinicopathological parameters and inflammation status in ccRCC. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves analysis was used to analyze the discrimination efficiency of miR-483-5p. in vitro experiments explored the biological role of miR-483-5p in renal cancer cells. miR-483-5p expression was upregulated in plasma of 5 patients with microarray and 12 patients with qRT-PCR in ccRCC at day 7 postoperatively. In addition, low expression of miR-483-5p was found in 58 ccRCC cancer tissues when compared with non-cancerous tissues. miR-483-5p could sufficiently discriminate ccRCC with the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.739 (P < .0001) from normal tissues. Higher expression of miR-483-5p was positively related to lower tumor stage and higher relative expression of miR-483-5p was inversely related to neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) (P = .03) and lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) (P = .026). Overexpression of miR-483-5p lead to reverse epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) process, restrain cell proliferation and metastasis of renal cancer cells. Our findings suggest that miR-483-5p expression is negatively correlation with inflammation status and may be a potential plasma biomarker for ccRCC.

Roles of autophagy in androgen-induced benign prostatic hyperplasia in castrated rats.

The present study investigated the role of androgen in the process of androgen-induced prostate hyperplasia in castrated rats and assessed the role of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/protein kinase B/mechanistic target of rapamycin (PI3K/Akt/mTOR) pathway in this process. Furthermore, the extent to which autophagy may affect the level of androgen-induced benign prostatic hyperplasia was also explored. A total of 40 Sprague Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups: Testosterone group, rapamycin group, 3-methyladenine (3-MA) group, and control group. The extent of hyperplasia in prostate tissue the apoptosis and autophagy were assayed. The prostate wet weight, volume and index in the testosterone group were significantly higher compared with the control group (P<0.05) and these factors were significantly lower in the rapamycin group compared with the testosterone group (P<0.05). HE staining demonstrated that prostate hyperplasia was obvious in the testosterone group. Western blotting revealed that caspase-3 levels were higher in the 3-MA group compared with the control group and Bcl-2 was higher in the testosterone group compared with the control group (P<0.05). Furthermore, in the rapamycin group, Bcl-2 protein expression levels were significantly lower than those in the testosterone group (P<0.05). The prostate tissue was analyzed using electron microscopy and autophagy bodies were identified in the rapamycin group. In the process of androgen-induced prostatic hyperplasia in castrated rats, the role of androgen may be related to the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway. Rapamycin was able to inhibit the effect of testosterone and promoted prostate tissue hyperplasia by inhibiting the PI3K/Akt pathway. In addition to inhibiting apoptosis in prostate cells, androgen was able to induce rat prostate hyperplasia and may also be related to the promotion of the proliferation of prostate cells.

MRI Volume Fusion Based on 3D Shearlet Decompositions.

Nowadays many MRI scans can give 3D volume data with different contrasts, but the observers may want to view various contrasts in the same 3D volume. The conventional 2D medical fusion methods can only fuse the 3D volume data layer by layer, which may lead to the loss of interframe correlative information. In this paper, a novel 3D medical volume fusion method based on 3D band limited shearlet transform (3D BLST) is proposed. And this method is evaluated upon MRI T2* and quantitative susceptibility mapping data of 4 human brains. Both the perspective impression and the quality indices indicate that the proposed method has a better performance than conventional 2D wavelet, DT CWT, and 3D wavelet, DT CWT based fusion methods.