Event-Triggered Bounded Consensus Tracking for Second-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems with Uncertainties.

This paper is concerned with event-triggered bounded consensus tracking for a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with uncertainties (MASs). Remarkably, the considered MASs allow multiple uncertainties, including unknown control coefficients, parameterized unknown nonlinearities, uncertain external disturbances, and the leader's control input being unknown. In this context, a new estimate-based adaptive control protocol with a triggering mechanism is proposed. We rule out Zeno behavior by testifying that the lower bound on the interval between two consecutive events is positive. It is shown that under the designed protocol, all signals caused by the closed-loop systems are bounded globally uniformly and tracking errors ultimately converge to a bounded set. The effectiveness of the devised control protocol is demonstrated through a simulation example.

Multi-scale convolutional recurrent neural network for psychiatric disorder identification in resting-state EEG.

Background: Accurate classification based on affordable objective neuroimaging biomarkers are important steps toward designing individualized treatment. Methods: In this work, we investigated a deep learning classification model, multi-scale convolutional recurrent neural network (MCRNN), to explore psychiatric disorder-related biomarkers by leveraging the spatiotemporal information of resting-state EEG (rsEEG) using a multiple psychiatric disorder database containing 327 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, major depressive disorders, and healthy controls. All subjects were mapped to a shared low-dimensional subspace for intuitively interpreting the inter-relationship and separation of psychiatric disorders. Results: Psychiatric disorders were identified using rsEEG with high accuracy ranged from 78.6 to 91.3% in patient vs. controls two-class classification, and 68.2% in four-class classification. The control-to-schizophrenia trajectory interpretated by the model was consistent with the disease severity in clinical observation. Conclusion: The MsRNN demonstrated a capability in extracting discriminative rsEEG biomarkers for psychiatric disorder classification, indicating its potential to facilitate our understanding of psychiatric disorders and monitoring interventions.

A fast online questionnaire for screening mental illness symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive effects on the situation of public mental health. A fast online questionnaire for screening and evaluating mental symptoms is urgent. In this work, we developed a new 19-item self-assessment Fast Screen Questionnaire for Mental Illness Symptoms (FSQ-MIS) to quickly identify mental illness symptoms. The FSQ-MIS was validated on a total of 3828 young adult mental disorder patients and 984 healthy controls. We applied principal component analysis (PCA), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and general log-linear analysis (GLA) to evaluate the construct and parallel validity. Results demonstrate that the proposed FSQ-MIS shows high test-retest reliability (0.852) and split-half reliability (0.844). Six factors obtained using PCA explained 54.3% of the variance and showed high correlations with other widely used scales. The ROC results (0.716-0.983) revealed high criterion validity of FSQ-MIS. GLA demonstrated the advantage of FSQ-MIS in predicting anxiety and depression prevalence in COVID-19, supporting the efficiency of FSQ-MIS as a tool for research and clinical practice.

Development and validation of a novel prognostic nomogram including tumor deposits could better predict survival for colorectal cancer: a population-based study.

BACKGROUND: The number of tumor deposits (TDs) in colorectal cancer (CRC) prognosis remains debated. We evaluated whether the number of TDs affects prognosis in stage III CRC patients. METHODS: Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed with Cox proportional hazards models. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate survival curves. The best cutoff was determined using X-Tile. Patients were 1:1 randomly divided into the training set or the testing set. Prognostic nomogram was established for stage III CRC patients. Concordance index (C-index) and calibration plot were used to assess Nomogram models. RESULTS: In total, 18,043 (84.69%) CRC patients without TDs and 3,263 (15.31%) patients with TDs were analyzed. Patients with TDs had significantly worse cancer-specific survival (CSS) rates (P<0.001). The number of TDs is an independent factor for the CSS of stage III CRC patients. CSS nomogram of stage III CRC patients was constructed based on race, age at diagnosis, tumor location, histological grade, pathological type, T, N, TDs, chemotherapy. In training set, C-index for CSS nomogram 0.762 (95% CI: 0.752-0.772). In testing set, the C-index for CSS nomogram 0.759 (95% CI: 0.749-0.768). The quality of calibration plots of nomogram models was high. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of TDs is an independent risk prognostic factor for stage III CRC. The number of TDs had a high proportion of prognostic impact.

Hyperprogressive disease in patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Hyperprogressive disease (HPD) is an unexpected response pattern observed in immune checkpoint therapy and associated with poor prognosis in several cancers. Such patients can't benefit from immunotherapy and even experience a rapid disease progression. At present, many researchers have explored the HPD phenomenon, but there is no consensual definition of HPD in different studies. The incidence of HPD is about 4%-29% in various tumors. Many studies demonstrated that HPD was associated with worse prognosis, but the mechanism of HPD has not yet been fully clarified. Predictive factors in patients with HPD before treatment is one of the keys to managing patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors. Some factors, such as MDM2/4 amplification, EGFR mutations, and old age may be risk factors for HPD, but the results are discordant in different studies. Performing imaging evaluation and biopsy as early as possible is the main method to avoid the iatrogenic injury of immunotherapy at present.

Altered Effective Brain Connectivity During Habituation in First Episode Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: A Dichotic Listening EEG Study.

Background: Habituation is considered to have protective and filtering mechanisms. The present study is aim to find the casual relationship and mechanisms of excitatory-inhibitory (E/I) dysfunctions in schizophrenia (SCZ) via habituation. Methods: A dichotic listening paradigm was performed with simultaneous EEG recording on 22 schizophrenia patients and 22 gender- and age-matched healthy controls. Source reconstruction and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analysis were performed to estimate the effective connectivity and casual relationship between frontal and temporal regions before and after habituation. Results: The schizophrenia patients expressed later habituation onset (p < 0.01) and hyper-activity in both lateral frontal-temporal cortices than controls (p = 0.001). The patients also showed decreased top-down and bottom-up connectivity in bilateral frontal-temporal regions (p < 0.01). The contralateral frontal-frontal and temporal-temporal connectivity showed a left to right decreasing (p < 0.01) and right to left strengthening (p < 0.01). Conclusions: The results give causal evidence for E/I imbalance in schizophrenia during dichotic auditory processing. The altered effective connectivity in frontal-temporal circuit could represent the trait bio-marker of schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations.

Accuracy of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Staging Rectal Cancer with Multidisciplinary Team: A Single-Center Experience.

Purpose: To investigate the accuracy of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in preoperative staging diagnosis for rectal cancer with multidisciplinary team (MDT) discussion. Methods: The retrospective study included 377 patients of rectal cancer with preoperative MRI staging from February 2015 to April 2018, in which 137 patients (36 received MDT discussion) received neoadjuvant therapy, 240 did not (97 received MDT discussion) and direct surgery was given. With postoperative pathological stage as the standard, the accuracy of MRI in preoperative staging for rectal cancer with MDT discussion was compared with non-MDT. Results: For direct surgery group, 21 out 97 (21.6%) patients changed their therapy strategy due to the change of the stage assessment after MDT. The accuracy of MRI for the diagnosis of preoperative N stage with MDT was significantly higher than those without MDT (56.2% vs. 42.1%, P=0.021). And for those without lymph node metastasis, the accuracy of MRI was higher after MDT (61.2% vs. 37.8%, P=0.009). For neoadjuvant therapy group, 7 out of 36 (19.4%) patients altered their therapy after MDT because of the changed stage. MDT improved the accuracy of restaging N stage with MRI (70.0% vs. 33.3%, P=0.003). The accuracy of MRI in staging T stage seemed not improved after MDT in both groups. Conclusions: In conclusion, MDT discussion increased the accuracy of MRI in preoperative staging diagnosis for rectal cancer. This mode could give a more accurate clinical stage of patients, which was in favor of choosing a preferable therapy strategy.

Preclinical rationale and clinical efficacy of antiangiogenic therapy and immune checkpoint blockade combination therapy in urogenital tumors.

PURPOSE: In recent years, immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapies have shown good clinical responses in various solid cancers. However, a major challenge in the process of ICB treatment is when tumors do not have enough infiltrating T cells. Antiangiogenic drugs targeting vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its receptors have been approved for the treatment of various malignant solid tumors alone or in combination with other therapies. Our review mainly discusses the preclinical rationale and clinical efficacy of antiangiogenic and ICB combination therapy in urogenital tumors. METHODS: We reviewed relevant literature on preclinical research and clinical trial results regarding antiangiogenic and ICB combination therapy in urogenital tumors from PubMed. In addition, we searched ongoing clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov to collect information related to this specific topic. RESULTS: Antiangiogenesis therapy could enhance T cell recruitment and increase T cell infiltration into the tumor microenvironment by blocking VEGF-VEGF receptor 2 binding and downstream signaling pathways to normalize tumor blood vessels. The combination of ICB and antiangiogenesis therapy could improve antitumor activity according to subsequent preclinical experiments and several phase I/II/III clinical trials on urogenital tumors. CONCLUSION: Combined therapy has shown some antitumor efficacy in several urogenital tumors, such as metastatic renal cell carcinoma, metastatic urothelial and genitourinary tumors, endometrial carcinoma, ovarian cancer, and fallopian tube cancer. Combination therapy is a promising strategy that can be used to improve the therapeutic efficacy, and the identification of precise biomarkers of this combined therapy is the direction of future studies.

The Role of Hyperthermia in the Multidisciplinary Treatment of Malignant Tumors.

Hyperthermia is often used in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer treatment. Recently, immunotherapy has become a popular research area, breaking exciting new ground with concurrent immunotherapy and hyperthermia. Much evidence has demonstrated the effectiveness of multidisciplinary synergistic therapy, and the underlying mechanism has been gradually explored. In this review, we focus on the mechanism of various cancer treatments in the current literature and recent advances in hyperthermia. Additionally, we review clinical studies of hyperthermia combined with other therapies in the previous 10 years and propose future prospects for hyperthermia in multidisciplinary synergistic therapy.

Competing nomograms help in the selection of elderly patients with colon cancer for adjuvant chemotherapy.

PURPOSE: The extent to which ≥ 70 year patients with colon cancer benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy in the presence of competing risks remains controversial. METHODS: 18,937 patients ≥ 70 years with high-risk stage II and stage III colon cancer were retrospectively reviewed from SEER database. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust for potential baseline confounding. The nomograms were developed based on the competing model to describe the individual probability of colon cancer-specific death (CCSD) and non-CCSD. The subpopulation treatment-effect pattern plot (STEPP) was used to estimate the treatment-effect heterogeneity. RESULTS: In the high-risk stage II subgroup, compared to the non-recipients, the hazard ratios (HR) of overall mortality for recipients were 0.83 (P = 0.001). The subdistribution hazard ratio (SHR) of CCSD for receipts was 1.22 (P = 0.021). The SHR of non-CCSD was 0.63 (P < 0.001). In the stage III subgroup, compared to non-recipients, the HR of the overall mortality for the recipients was 0.62 (P < 0.001). The SHR of CCSD was 0.77 (P < 0.001). The SHR of non-CCSD was 0.58 (P < 0.001). The chemotherapy efficacy differed significantly by risk score of non-CCSD (non-CCSD-RS) (P < 0.001). Recipients with high non-CCSD-RS had a rate of CCSD comparative to that of non-recipients (SHR 0.90, P = 0.150) in the stage III subgroup. CONCLUSIONS: A survival analysis based on the overall mortality did not correctly interpret the effect of chemotherapy. Adjuvant chemotherapy did not provide an additional benefit to patients with high-risk stage II or patients with stage III at high risk of non-cancer death.