Pelvic Abscess Caused by Ureteral Calculus and Abscess Treatment through Aspiration by Transperineal Puncture.

Pelvic abscess is mostly caused by gynecological inflammation or digestive system diseases such as appendicitis or Crohn's disease. This case of pelvic abscess originates from ureteral calculus and is not commonly seen in clinical practice. This is mainly due to the patient's ureteral stones not being actively treated. After local puncture and pus extraction, as well as the application of effective antibiotics, the patient recovered. Therefore, this case provides clinical doctors with experience that ureteral stones may cause serious complications and should be actively treated after detection.

Evaluation of Clinical Efficacy of Acupuncture and Moxibustion for Asthma: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Objective: The effectiveness of manual acupuncture for treating bronchial asthma is still debatable and broad, and the effects of different acupuncture points, treatment durations, or illness trajectories have never been rigorously assessed. The objective of this revised systematic review and subgroup meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is to ascertain the clinical efficacy of manual acupuncture on bronchial asthma and whether these effects varied depending on the acupuncture points, length of treatment, or course of the disease. Materials and methods: PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) criteria were followed for creating a systematic review and meta-analysis. From the beginning through March 25, 2022, six electronic databases were checked. For the treatment of asthma, all RCTs contrasting acupuncture therapy along with conventional treatment against conventional treatment alone were chosen. The information was examined using Review Manager version 5.3 and Comprehensive Meta-Analysis version 3. Clinical efficacy (including the effective rate and the recurrence rate) was the primary outcome, and pulmonary function (including FEV1%, PEF) and The secondary results were T-lymphocyte immunity (containing CD3+, CD4+, and CD8+). Based on the acupuncture points, length of therapy, and nature of the condition, subgroup analyses were carried out. Results: There were a total of 21 RCTs that enrolled 2510 individuals. According to the meta-findings, analysis's manual acupuncture in addition to conventional treatment significantly increased the effective rate when compared to conventional treatment alone [OR = 5.14 95% CI 3.58-7.38, P < .00001], lung functions [FEV1% (MD = 6.18, 95% CI 2.40-9.96, P = .001) and PEF (MD = 0.45 95% CI 0.18-0.73, P = .001)], immune functions [CD3+ T lymphocytes (MD = 7.55 95% CI 6.55-8.56, P < .00001), CD4+ T-lymphocytes (MD = 5.11 95% CI 4.09-6.13, P < .00001), T-lymphocyte CD8+ (MD = -0.37.11 95% CI -3.62--2.51, P < .00001)] and noteworthy reduction in the recurrence rate (OR = 0.19 95% CI 0.10-0.38, P < .00001). Results from the subgroup analysis were consistent. Conclusion: Manual acupuncture combined with Western Medicine is more effective than conventional treatment alone for bronchial asthma. Combination therapy can significantly improve clinical efficacy, lung function, and immune function while reducing the relapse rate. But to further support the results of this investigation, high-quality RCTs with long-term outcomes are still required, taking into account the inherent limitations of the included studies. Registration number: PROSPERO (no. CRD42022357805) (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/).

ANGPTL4 accelerates ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma carcinogenesis and angiogenesis in the tumor microenvironment by activating the JAK2/STAT3 pathway and interacting with ESM1.

BACKGROUND: Ovarian cancer (OC) is a malignant neoplasm that displays increased vascularization. Angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4) is a secreted glycoprotein that functions as a regulator of cell metabolism and angiogenesis and plays a critical role in tumorigenesis. However, the precise role of ANGPTL4 in the OC microenvironment, particularly its involvement in angiogenesis, has not been fully elucidated. METHODS: The expression of ANGPTL4 was confirmed by bioinformatics and IHC in OC. The potential molecular mechanism of ANGPTL4 was measured by RNA-sequence. We used a series of molecular biological experiments to measure the ANGPTL4-JAK2-STAT3 and ANGPTL4-ESM1 axis in OC progression, including MTT, EdU, wound healing, transwell, xenograft model, oil red O staining, chick chorioallantoic membrane assay and zebrafish model. Moreover, the molecular mechanisms were confirmed by Western blot, Co-IP and molecular docking. RESULTS: Our study demonstrates a significant upregulation of ANGPTL4 in OC specimens and its strong association with unfavorable prognosis. RNA-seq analysis affirms that ANGPTL4 facilitates OC development by driving JAK2-STAT3 signaling pathway activation. The interaction between ANGPTL4 and ESM1 promotes ANGPTL4 binding to lipoprotein lipase (LPL), thereby resulting in reprogrammed lipid metabolism and the promotion of OC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In the OC microenvironment, ESM1 may interfere with the binding of ANGPTL4 to integrin and vascular-endothelial cadherin (VE-Cad), which leads to stabilization of vascular integrity and ultimately promotes angiogenesis. CONCLUSION: Our findings underscore that ANGPTL4 promotes OC development via JAK signaling and induces angiogenesis in the tumor microenvironment through its interaction with ESM1.

On the Robustness of Average Losses for Partial-Label Learning.

Partial-label learning (PLL) utilizes instances with PLs, where a PL includes several candidate labels but only one is the true label (TL). In PLL, identification-based strategy (IBS) purifies each PL on the fly to select the (most likely) TL for training; average-based strategy (ABS) treats all candidate labels equally for training and let trained models be able to predict TL. Although PLL research has focused on IBS for better performance, ABS is also worthy of study since modern IBS behaves like ABS in the beginning of training to prepare for PL purification and TL selection. In this paper, we analyze why ABS was unsatisfactory and propose how to improve it. Theoretically, we propose two problem settings of PLL and prove that average PL losses (APLLs) with bounded multi-class losses are always robust, while APLLs with unbounded losses may be non-robust, which is the first robustness analysis for PLL. Experimentally, we have two promising findings: ABS using bounded losses can match/exceed state-of-the-art performance of IBS using unbounded losses; after using robust APLLs to warm start, IBS can further improve upon itself. Our work draws attention to ABS research, which can in turn boost IBS and push forward the whole PLL.

Robust Multi-Agent Communication With Graph Information Bottleneck Optimization.

Recent research on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown that action coordination of multi-agents can be significantly enhanced by introducing communication learning mechanisms. Meanwhile, graph neural network (GNN) provides a promising paradigm for communication learning of MARL. Under this paradigm, agents and communication channels can be regarded as nodes and edges in the graph, and agents can aggregate information from neighboring agents through GNN. However, this GNN-based communication paradigm is susceptible to adversarial attacks and noise perturbations, and how to achieve robust communication learning under perturbations has been largely neglected. To this end, this paper explores this problem and introduces a robust communication learning mechanism with graph information bottleneck optimization, which can optimally realize the robustness and effectiveness of communication learning. We introduce two information-theoretic regularizers to learn the minimal sufficient message representation for multi-agent communication. The regularizers aim at maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the message representation and action selection while minimizing the MI between the agent feature and message representation. Besides, we present a MARL framework that can integrate the proposed communication mechanism with existing value decomposition methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more robust and efficient than state-of-the-art GNN-based MARL methods.

[Diagnostic Efficacy of 68Ga-Labeled Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen and 18F-Labeled Sodium Fluoride PET/CT in Prostate Cancer With Bone Metastasis].

Objective To compare the efficiency of 68Ga-labeled prostate-specific membrane antigen (68Ga-PSMA-11) and 18F-labeled sodium fluoride (18F-NaF) PET/CT in the diagnosis of bone metastasis in the patients with prostate cancer.Methods The prostate cancer patients suspected of bone metastasis who underwent 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT and 18F-NaF PET/CT from January 2018 to January 2021 were included in this study.The number of lesions,maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax),and tumor-to-background (T/B) ratio were compared between the two methods.Results 18F-NaF PET/CT detected more metastases than 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT (310 vs.264,P<0.001).The median SUVmax[23.2 (16.4,33.4) vs.4.1 (2.5,5.6)] and median T/B ratio[7.0 (4.9,9.9) vs.6.7 (3.7,9.6)] of 18F-NaF PET/CT were higher than those of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT (all P<0.001).With the number of lesions as the indicator,the sensitivity,specificity,accuracy,positive predictive value,and negative predictive value of 18F-NaF PET/CT were 100.0%,92.0%,92.0%,98.7%,and 100.0% respectively,and those of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT were 85.2%,94.0%,79.2%,98.9%,and 50.5%,respectively.Conclusion 18F-NaF PET/CT is superior to 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT in the detection of bone metastases of prostate cancer.

Cl2 ⋠- Mediates Direct and Selective Conversion of Inert C(sp3 )-H Bonds into Aldehydes/Ketones.

Developing new reactive pathway to activate inert C(sp3 )-H bonds for valuable oxygenated products remains a challenge. We prepared a series of triazine conjugated organic polymers to photoactivate C-H into aldehyde/ketone via O2 →H2 O2 →⋅OH→Cl⋅→Cl2 ⋅- . Experiment results showed Cl2 ⋅- could successively activate C(sp3 )-H more effectively than Cl⋅ to generate unstable dichlorinated intermediates, increasing the kinetic rate ratio of dichlorination to monochlorination by a factor of 2,000 and thus breaking traditional dichlorination kinetic constraints. These active intermediates were hydrolyzed into aldehydes or ketones easily, when compared with typical stable dichlorinated complexes, avoiding chlorinated by-product generation. Moreover, an integrated two-phase system in an acid solution strengthened the Cl2 ⋅- mediated process and inhibited product overoxidation, where the conversion rate of toluene reached 16.94 mmol/g/h and the selectivity of benzaldehyde was 99.5 %. This work presents a facile and efficient approach for selective conversion of inert C(sp3 )-H bonds using Cl2 ⋅- .

[Causes of False-Positive Results in 68Ga-Labeled Fibroblast Activation Protein Inhibitor PET/CT Imaging].

Objective To investigate the causes of false-positive results in the 68Ga-labeled fibroblast activation protein inhibitor (68Ga-FAPI-04) PET/CT imaging. Methods The imaging data of 547 patients undergoing 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT examination in the Department of Nuclear Medicine of the Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University from September 2020 to May 2021 were retrospectively collected.Two experienced nuclear medicine diagnostic physicians analyzed the clinical data,relevant imaging examinations,laboratory examinations,pathological results and follow-up results of the patients with false-positive results. Results The 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT imaging of 547 patients showed false-positive results in 99 (18.1%) patients,including 56 males and 43 females.The postoperative pathological examination confirmed false-positive results in 13 patients,including 1 patient of thyroiditis,2 patients of pulmonary tuberculosis,1 patient of bone tuberculosis,2 patients of pulmonary inflammatory pseudotumor,1 patient of pulmonary sarcoidosis,1 patient of pulmonary benign fibroma,1 patient of organic pneumonia,2 patients of renal angiomyolipoma,1 patient of mass pancreatitis,and 1 patient of pancreatic mucinous cystadenoma.The medical history,relevant imaging examination,and long-term follow-up confirmed false-positive results in 86 patients.Specifically,the false-positive uptake in the neck,chest,abdomen,bone joint,and skin occurred in 8 (9.3%),13 (15.1%),5 (5.8%),57 (66.3%),and 3 (3.5%) patients,respectively.Inflammation-related uptake appeared in 83 (83.8%) patients with false-positive imaging results,of which arthritis (23 patients) and osteophyte (29 patients) were the most common.Sixteen (16.2%) patients showed the false-positive uptake related to fibroblasts. Conclusion 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT imaging will show non-malignant tumor false-positive results,which are mainly associated with inflammation and fibroblasts.

Energy and air? The impact of energy efficiency improvement on air quality in China.

The global economic growth is hindered by resources shortage, energy demand, air pollution and climate. Energy efficiency can reduce some pollutants while potentially increase others. This study refers to sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and dust and smoke (DS) as primary pollutants to distinguish it from secondary ones. The influence of energy efficiency, socioeconomic, and natural climatic factors on air quality is analyzed under the theory of STIRPAT. It is highly coupled between energy efficiency and the spatial distribution of air quality. Increased energy efficiency can improve air quality by reducing SO2 and NOx, but the impact on DS is insignificant. Air pollutants decrease by about 0.531% for every 1% increase in temperature and 0.105% for every 1% increase in precipitation. Consumption will reduce air pollution, and there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between population density, economic scale, urbanization, technology innovation, and air pollution. It is worth mentioning that this work adds temperature and precipitation to the STIRPAT as natural climatic factors, analyzing the impact of energy efficiency on air pollution under the two-factor restrictions of socioeconomic and natural climatic factors. Finally, management suggestions are made to improve air quality.

Assessment of genetic diversity and population structure of Neocaridina denticulata sinensis in the Baiyangdian drainage area, China, using microsatellite markers and mitochondrial cox1 gene sequences.

Neocaridina denticulata sinensis is a crustacean of major economic significance in the Baiyangdian drainage area. In this study, the first assessment of N. denticulata sinensis genetic diversity and population structure was performed based on sequence analysis of nine polymorphic microsatellite loci and the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (cox1) gene. Samples (n = 192) were collected from four different regions in the Baiyangdian drainage area i.e., Baiyangdian Lake, Jumahe River, Xidayang Reservoir, and Fuhe River. Microsatellite loci analysis identified high levels of genetic diversity represented by observed heterozygosity (Ho) of 0.6865 âˆ¼ 0.9583, expected heterozygosity (He) of 0.7151 âˆ¼ 0.8723, and polymorphism information content (PIC) of 0.6676 âˆ¼ 0.8585. Based on the analysis of cox1 sequences, haplotype diversity (Hd) ranged from 0.568 to 0.853 while nucleotide diversity (π) ranged from 0.0029 to 0.2236. Furthermore, there was no evidence of expansion events in the N. denticulata sinensis populations. Pairwise FST revealed pronounced genetic differentiation, and clustering analyses showed defined genetic structures within the N. denticulata sinensis population. Three groups were identified from four sampled stocks, with Xidayang Reservoir, and Fuhe River populations clustered in the same group. This work identified novel molecular markers and provided an important reference to guide management strategies to assist conservation of N. denticulata sinensis resources.

Artificial intelligence for gastroenterology: Singapore artificial intelligence for Gastroenterology Working Group Position Statement.

BACKGROUND: Successful implementation of artificial intelligence in gastroenterology and hepatology practice requires more than technology. There are ethical, legal, and social issues that need to be settled. AIM: A group consisting of AI developers (engineer), AI users (gastroenterologist, hepatologist, and surgeon) and AI regulators (ethicist and administrator) formed a Working Group to draft these Positions Statements with the objective of arousing public and professional interest and dialogue, to promote ethical considerations when implementing AI technology, to suggest to policy makers and health authorities relevant factors to take into account when approving and regulating the use of AI tools, and to engage the profession in preparing for change in clinical practice. STATEMENTS: These series of Position Statements point out the salient issues to maintain the trust between care provider and care receivers, and to legitimize the use of a non-human tool in healthcare delivery. It is based on fundamental principles such as respect, autonomy, privacy, responsibility, and justice. Enforcing the use of AI without considering these factor risk damaging the doctor-patient relationship.

Construction and application of Chinese breast cancer knowledge graph based on multi-source heterogeneous data.

The knowledge graph is a critical resource for medical intelligence. The general medical knowledge graph tries to include all diseases and contains much medical knowledge. However, it is challenging to review all the triples manually. Therefore the quality of the knowledge graph can not support intelligence medical applications. Breast cancer is one of the highest incidences of cancer at present. It is urgent to improve the efficiency of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment through artificial intelligence technology and improve the postoperative health status of breast cancer patients. This paper proposes a framework to construct a breast cancer knowledge graph from heterogeneous data resources in response to this demand. Specifically, this paper extracts knowledge triple from clinical guidelines, medical encyclopedias and electronic medical records. Furthermore, the triples from different data resources are fused to build a breast cancer knowledge graph (BCKG). Experimental results demonstrate that BCKG can support knowledge-based question answering, breast cancer postoperative follow-up and healthcare, and improve the quality and efficiency of breast cancer diagnosis, treatment and management.

Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizae and extraradical mycelium of subtropical tree species on soil nitrogen mineralization and enzyme activities.

Through symbiosis with plants, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi effectively improve the availability of soil nitrogen (N). However, the mechanism through which AM and associated extraradical mycelium affect soil N mineralization remains unknow. We carried out an in situ soil culture experiment by using in-growth cores in plantations of three subtropical tree species, Cunninghamia lanceolata, Schima superba, and Liquidambar formosana. We measured soil physical and chemical properties, net N mineralization rate, and the activities of four kinds of hydrolase (leucine aminopeptidase (LAP), ß-1,4-N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAG), ß-1,4-glucosidase (ßG), cellobiohydrolase (CB)) and two kinds of oxidases (polyphenol oxidase (POX) and peroxidase (PER)) involved in soil organic matter (SOM) mineralization in treatments of mycorrhiza (with absorbing roots and hyphae), hyphae (hyphae only), and control (mycorrhiza-free). The results showed that mycorrhizal treatments significantly affected soil total carbon and pH but did not affect N mineralization rates and all enzymatic activities. Tree species significantly affected net ammonification rate, net N mineralization rate and activities of NAG, ßG, CB, POX and PER. The net N mineralization rate and enzyme activities in the C. lanceolata stand were significantly higher than that in monoculture broad-leaved stands of either S. superba or L. formosana. There was no interactive effect of mycorrhizal treatment and tree species on any of soil properties, nor on enzymatic activities or net N mineralization rates. Soil pH was negatively and significantly correlated with five kinds of enzymatic activities except for LAP, while net N mineralization rate significantly correlated with ammonium nitrogen content, available phosphorus content, and the activity level of ßG, CB, POX, and PER. In conclusion, there was no difference in enzymatic activities and N mineralization rates between rhizosphere and hyphosphere soils of three subtropical tree species in the whole growing season. The activity of particular carbon cycle-related enzymes was closely related to soil N mineralization rate. It is suggested that differences in litter quality and root functional traits among different tree species affect soil enzyme activities and N mineralization rates through organic matter inputs and shaping soil condition.

Development and validation of a liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry method for the determination of isopeptide ε-(γ-glutamyl) lysine in human urine as biomarker for transglutaminase 2 cross-linked proteins.

Determination of the levels of protein cross-linking catalysed by the activity of transglutaminase 2 in various disease states has remained a significant challenge. The ability to quantify the isopeptide ε-(γ-glutamyl) lysine, which can form as a heterogeneous bond within or between proteins has significant analytical and clinical potential as a biomarker in biofluids such as human urine. Increased transglutaminase 2 activity is associated with a number of diseases, such as fibrosis. Previously published methods have been based on classical amino acid analysis, however they require a complex multi-enzyme digestion in order to achieve complete protein digestion, whilst leaving the isopeptide cross link intact. These methods require high levels of enzymes, which contaminate the analysis and alter the dynamics of digestion. The amino acid analysis detection also lacked selectivity, especially where the levels of crosslink are expected to be low relative to the background protein levels. We have systematically addressed these challenges, by optimising the precipitation of the protein in urine, the use of innovative immobilised enzyme technology, which allows for efficient digestion without enzyme contamination and LC-MS/MS detection based on multiple reaction monitoring. This method was validated for its analytical performance characteristics, showing the method has a sensitivity of 0.1 ng/mL of ε-(γ-glutamyl) lysine in human urine with precision of less than 20% CV, and is selective as no interferences were observed that may adversely affect the analysis. As such this approach represents a significant advance in the ability to detect and quantify ε-(γ-glutamyl) lysine.

Fluoride Evaporation of Low-Fluoride CaF2-CaO-Al2O3-MgO-TiO2-(Na2O-K2O) Slag for Electroslag Remelting.

To elucidate the behavior of fluoride evaporation in an electroslag remelting process, the non-isothermal evaporation of the low-fluoride CaF2-CaO-Al2O3-MgO-TiO2-(Na2O-K2O) slag is studied using thermogravimetric analysis. The evaporation law of the melted slag is further verified using thermodynamic calculations. Fourier transformation infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is used to evaluate the change in slag structure. It is discovered that the principal evaporating substances are CaF2, KF, and NaF, while the evaporation of MgF2, AlF3, and AlOF is less. KF evaporates absolutely in the early stage of the reaction, and CaF2 evaporates in a large proportion during the late reaction period. At 1500 °C, the order of vapor pressure is KF > CaF2. When K2O and Na2O are added to the residue sample at the same time, the evaporation ability of KF is stronger than that of CaF2 and NaF. As the K2O content increases from 0 to 8.3 wt%, evaporation increases from 0.76% to 1.21%. The evaporation rates of samples containing more K2O and those containing more Na2O are 1.48% and 1.32%, respectively. Under the same conditions, K2O has a greater effect on evaporation than Na2O. FTIR results show that the addition of K2O depolymerizes the network structure and that K2O can depolymerize the network structure better than Na2O.

Multiagent Reinforcement Learning With Graphical Mutual Information Maximization.

Communication learning is an important research direction in the multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) domain. Graph neural networks (GNNs) can aggregate the information of neighbor nodes for representation learning. In recent years, several MARL methods leverage GNN to model information interactions between agents to coordinate actions and complete cooperative tasks. However, simply aggregating the information of neighboring agents through GNNs may not extract enough useful information, and the topological relationship information is ignored. To tackle this difficulty, we investigate how to efficiently extract and utilize the rich information of neighbor agents as much as possible in the graph structure, so as to obtain high-quality expressive feature representation to complete the cooperation task. To this end, we present a novel GNN-based MARL method with graphical mutual information (MI) maximization to maximize the correlation between input feature information of neighbor agents and output high-level hidden feature representations. The proposed method extends the traditional idea of MI optimization from graph domain to multiagent system, in which the MI is measured from two aspects: agent features information and agent topological relationships. The proposed method is agnostic to specific MARL methods and can be flexibly integrated with various value function decomposition methods. Considerable experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that the performance of our proposed method is superior to the existing MARL methods.

Highly Accurate and Robust Absolute Quantification of Target Proteins in Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded (FFPE) Tissues by LC-MS.

Accurate, absolute liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based quantification of target proteins in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues would greatly expand sample availability for pharmaceutical/clinical investigations but remains challenging owing to the following issues: (i) efficient/quantitative recovery of target signature peptides from FFPE tissues is essential but an optimal procedure for targeted, absolute quantification is lacking; (ii) most FFPE samples are long-term-stored; severe immunohistochemistry (IHC) signal losses of target proteins during storage were widely reported, while the effect of storage on LC-MS-based methods was unknown; and (iii) the proper strategy to prepare calibration/quality-control samples to ensure accurate targeted protein analysis in FFPE tissues remained elusive. Using targeted quantification of monoclonal antibody (mAb), antigen, and 40 tissue markers in FFPE tissues as a model system, we extensively investigate those issues and develope an LC-MS-based strategy enabling accurate and precise targeted protein quantification in FFPE samples. First, we demonstrated a surfactant cocktail-based procedure (f-SEPOD), providing high/reproducible recovery of target signature peptides from FFPE tissues. Second, a heat-accelerated degradation study within a roughly estimated 5 year storage period recapitulated the loss of protein IHC signals while LC-MS signals of all targets remained constant. This indicates that the storage of FFPE tissues mainly causes decreased immunoreactivity but unlikely chemical degradation of proteins, which strongly suggests that the storage of FFPE tissues does not cause significant quantitative bias for LC-MS-based methods. Third, while a conventional spike-and-extract approach for calibration caused substantial negative biases, a novel approach, using FFPE-treated calibration standards, enabled accurate and precise quantification. With the pipeline, we conducted the first-ever pharmacokinetics measurement of mAb and its target in FFPE tissues, where time courses by FFPE vs fresh tissues showed excellent correlation.

Kelch-like proteins in the gastrointestinal tumors.

Gastrointestinal tumors have become a worldwide health problem with high morbidity and poor clinical outcomes. Chemotherapy and surgery, the main treatment methods, are still far from meeting the treatment needs of patients, and targeted therapy is in urgent need of development. Recently, emerging evidence suggests that kelch-like (KLHL) proteins play essential roles in maintaining proteostasis and are involved in the progression of various cancers, functioning as adaptors in the E3 ligase complex and promoting the specific degradation of substrates. Therefore, KLHL proteins should be taken into consideration for targeted therapy strategy discovery. This review summarizes the current knowledge of KLHL proteins in gastrointestinal tumors and discusses the potential of KLHL proteins as potential drug targets and prognostic biomarkers.

Deep Learning From Multiple Noisy Annotators as A Union.

Crowdsourcing is a popular solution for large-scale data annotations. So far, various end-to-end deep learning methods have been proposed to improve the practical performance of learning from crowds. Despite their practical effectiveness, most of them have two major limitations-they do not hold learning consistency and suffer from computational inefficiency. In this article, we propose a novel method named UnionNet, which is not only theoretically consistent but also experimentally effective and efficient. Specifically, unlike existing methods that either fit a given label from each annotator independently or fuse all the labels into a reliable one, we concatenate the one-hot encoded vectors of crowdsourced labels provided by all the annotators, which takes all the labeling information as a union and coordinates multiple annotators. In this way, we can directly train an end-to-end deep neural network by maximizing the likelihood of this union with only a parametric transition matrix. We theoretically prove the learning consistency and experimentally show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Diagnostic Efficacy of 68Ga-Labeled Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen and 18F-Labeled Sodium Fluoride PET/CT in Prostate Cancer With Bone Metastasis / 中国医学科学院学报

Objective To compare the efficiency of 68Ga-labeled prostate-specific membrane antigen (68Ga-PSMA-11) and 18F-labeled sodium fluoride (18F-NaF) PET/CT in the diagnosis of bone metastasis in the patients with prostate cancer.Methods The prostate cancer patients suspected of bone metastasis who underwent 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT and 18F-NaF PET/CT from January 2018 to January 2021 were included in this study.The number of lesions,maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax),and tumor-to-background (T/B) ratio were compared between the two methods.Results 18F-NaF PET/CT detected more metastases than 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT (310 vs.264,P<0.001).The median SUVmax[23.2 (16.4,33.4) vs.4.1 (2.5,5.6)] and median T/B ratio[7.0 (4.9,9.9) vs.6.7 (3.7,9.6)] of 18F-NaF PET/CT were higher than those of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT (all P<0.001).With the number of lesions as the indicator,the sensitivity,specificity,accuracy,positive predictive value,and negative predictive value of 18F-NaF PET/CT were 100.0%,92.0%,92.0%,98.7%,and 100.0% respectively,and those of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT were 85.2%,94.0%,79.2%,98.9%,and 50.5%,respectively.Conclusion 18F-NaF PET/CT is superior to 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT in the detection of bone metastases of prostate cancer.