Efficacy and safety of intravitreal faricimab for neovascular age-related macular degeneration: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the visual, anatomical, and safety outcomes of the intravitreal faricimab, a novel vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)/angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2) bispecific agent, in neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) patients. The follow-up times in the included studies ranged from a minimum of 36 weeks to a maximum of 52 weeks. EMBASE, Ovid-Medline, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Web of Science, Scopus, the WHO ICTRP, ClinicalTrial.gov, the EU Clinical Trials Register, and Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) were searched (The last literature search was performed on August 17, 2023) for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing faricimab with control groups for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). The risk of bias for eligible RCTs was independently assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool by two authors (W.-T.Y. and C.-S.W.). The meta-analysis was conducted using Review Manager 5.4 software. The mean best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), central subfield thickness (CST), total choroidal neovascularization (CNV) area, and total lesion leakage were analyzed as continuous variables and the outcome measurements were reported as the weighted mean difference (WMD) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). The ocular adverse events and ocular serious adverse events were analyzed as dichotomous variables and the outcome measurements were analyzed as the odds ratios (ORs) with a 95% CI. Random-effects model was used in our study for all outcome synthesizing due to different clinical characteristics. Four RCTs with 1,486 patients were eligible for quantitative analysis. There was no statistically significant difference between intravitreal faricimab and anti-VEGF in BCVA [weighted mean difference (WMD) = 0.47; 95% CI: (- 0.17, 1.11)]. The intravitreal faricimab group showed numerically lower CST [WMD = - 5.96; 95% CI = (- 7.11, - 4.82)], total CNV area [WMD = - 0.49; 95% CI = (- 0.68, - 0.30)], and total lesion leakage [WMD = - 0.88; 95% CI = (- 1.08, - 0.69)] after intravitreal therapy compared with the intravitreal anti-VEGF group. There were no statistically significant differences between intravitreal faricimab and anti-VEGF in ocular adverse events (AEs) [pooled odds ratio (OR) = 1.10; 95% CI = (0.81, 1.49)] and serious adverse events (SAEs) [pooled OR = 0.84; 95% CI = (0.37, 1.90)]. The intravitreal bispecific anti-VEGF/angiopoietin 2 (Ang2) antibody faricimab with a extended injection interval was non-inferior to first-line anti-VEGF agents in BCVA. It was safe and had better anatomical recovery. Large, well-designed RCTs are needed to explore the potential benefit of extended faricimab for nAMD. This systematic review was registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) database (CRD42022327450).

Pachymeningeal en plaque metastasis from gastric cancer mimicking subdural hematoma: illustrative case.

BACKGROUND: Pachymeningeal metastasis associated with gastric cancer, especially in its early stages, is extremely rare. OBSERVATIONS: The authors describe a 77-year-old man with a past medical history of lung cancer and previously treated chronic subdural hematoma who was admitted to their hospital because of hematemesis and newly diagnosed gastric cancer. He became unconscious during the hospitalization. The preoperative brain imaging studies had the appearance of recurrent subdural hematoma and extracranial tumor with skull invasion. Craniotomy revealed pachymeningeal carcinomatosis and en plaque metastasis of tumor. The histopathology of the tumors was consistent with metastatic gastric adenocarcinoma. LESSONS: This is the first reported case of metastatic gastric cancer as a pachymeninges-based en plaque entity. This report highlights the rare radiological presentation and operative findings in this case. The authors also summarize those case reports associated with dural metastasis arising from gastric cancer.

Crystallization Kinetics Control Enabled by a Green Ionic Liquid Additive toward Efficient and Stable Carbon-Based Mesoscopic Perovskite Solar Cells.

Carbon-based mesoscopic perovskite solar cells (MPSCs) are becoming one of the most competitive photovoltaic technologies owing to their lower manufacturing cost and excellent stability. In this work, methylammonium acetate (MAAc), an ionic liquid additive, is added into methylammonium lead triiodide (MAPbI3) perovskite and is used to fabricate high-performance MPSCs. Systematic and detailed studies have shown that the MAAc interacts with PbI2 preferentially to form a MAPbI3-x(Ac)x intermediate phase that can effectively control the crystallization kinetics of MAPbI3 in the triple-mesoscopic layer. MAPbI3 films with an appropriate amount of MAAc exhibit higher crystallinity, lower defect density, and dense pore filling, which effectively reduce carrier non-radiative recombination loss in MPSCs. As a result, a champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 13.54% is obtained based on the optimized MAAc-engineered MPSCs. The PCE is 24% higher than 10.90% of the control devices. Moreover, unencapsulated MAAc-engineered MPSCs retain 90% of their initial PCE after being stored in the dark for 50 days under ambient atmosphere, which demonstrates much better air stability than control devices. This work provides an effective strategy for developing efficient and stable carbon-based MPSCs with an eco-friendly ionic liquid additive.

Widar3.0: Zero-Effort Cross-Domain Gesture Recognition With Wi-Fi.

With the development of signal processing technology, the ubiquitous Wi-Fi devices open an unprecedented opportunity to solve the challenging human gesture recognition problem by learning motion representations from wireless signals. Wi-Fi-based gesture recognition systems, although yield good performance on specific data domains, are still practically difficult to be used without explicit adaptation efforts to new domains. Various pioneering approaches have been proposed to resolve this contradiction but extra training efforts are still necessary for either data collection or model re-training when new data domains appear. To advance cross-domain recognition and achieve fully zero-effort recognition, we propose Widar3.0, a Wi-Fi-based zero-effort cross-domain gesture recognition system. The key insight of Widar3.0 is to derive and extract domain-independent features of human gestures at the lower signal level, which represent unique kinetic characteristics of gestures and are irrespective of domains. On this basis, we develop a one-fits-all general model that requires only one-time training but can adapt to different data domains. Experiments on various domain factors (i.e. environments, locations, and orientations of persons) demonstrate the accuracy of 92.7% for in-domain recognition and 82.6%-92.4% for cross-domain recognition without model re-training, outperforming the state-of-the-art solutions.

Atrial Fibrillation Is Not an Independent Determinant of Mortality Among Critically Ill Acute Ischemic Stroke Patients: A Propensity Score-Matched Analysis From the MIMIC-IV Database.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE: This study was conducted to investigate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with acute ischemic stroke and atrial fibrillation (AF) in intensive care units (ICUs). METHODS: In the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV database, 1,662 patients with acute ischemic stroke were identified from 2008 to 2019. Of the 1,662 patients, 653 had AF. The clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with and without AF were compared using propensity score matching (PSM). Furthermore, univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyzes were performed. RESULTS: Of the 1,662 patients, 39.2% had AF. The prevalence of AF in these patients increased in a stepwise manner with advanced age. Patients with AF were older and had higher Charlson Comorbidity Index, CHA2DS2-VASc Score, HAS-BLED score, and Acute Physiology Score III than those without AF. After PSM, 1,152 patients remained, comprising 576 matched pairs in both groups. In multivariate analysis, AF was not associated with higher ICU mortality [hazard ratio (HR), 0.95; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.64-1.42] or in-hospital mortality (HR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.79-1.47). In Kaplan-Meier analysis, no difference in ICU or in-hospital mortality was observed between patients with and without AF. CONCLUSIONS: AF could be associated with poor clinical characteristics and outcomes; however, it does not remain an independent short-term predictor of ICU and in-hospital mortality among patients with acute ischemic stroke after PSM with multivariate analysis.

Temporal understanding of human mobility: A multi-time scale analysis.

The recent availability of digital traces generated by cellphone calls has significantly increased the scientific understanding of human mobility. Until now, however, based on low time resolution measurements, previous works have ignored to study human mobility under various time scales due to sparse and irregular calls, particularly in the era of mobile Internet. In this paper, we introduced Mobile Flow Records, flow-level data access records of online activity of smartphone users, to explore human mobility. Mobile Flow Records collect high-resolution information of large populations. By exploiting this kind of data, we show the models and statistics of human mobility at a large-scale (3,542,235 individuals) and finer-granularity (7.5min). Next, we investigated statistical variations and biases of mobility models caused by different time scales (from 7.5min to 32h), and found that the time scale does influence the mobility model, which indicates a deep coupling of human mobility and time. We further show that mobility behaviors like transportation modes contribute to the diversity of human mobility, by exploring several novel and refined features (e.g., motion speed, duration, and trajectory distance). Particularly, we point out that 2-hour sampling adopted in previous works is insufficient to study detailed motion behaviors. Our work not only offers a macroscopic and microscopic view of spatial-temporal human mobility, but also applies previously unavailable features, both of which are beneficial to the studies on phenomena driven by human mobility.