The role of ferroptosis in radiotherapy and combination therapy for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (Review).

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a highly aggressive, heterogeneous tumour usually caused by alcohol and tobacco consumption, making it one of the most common malignancies worldwide. Despite the fact that various therapeutic approaches such as surgery, radiation therapy (RT), chemotherapy (CT) and targeted therapy have been widely used for HNSCC in recent years, its recurrence rate and mortality rate remain high. RT is the standard treatment choice for HNSCC, which induces reactive oxygen species production and causes oxidative stress, ultimately leading to tumour cell death. CT is a widely recognized form of cancer treatment that treats a variety of cancers by eliminating cancer cells and preventing them from reproducing. Immune checkpoint inhibitor and epidermal growth factor receptor are important in the treatment of recurrent or metastatic HNSCC. Iron death, a type of cell death regulated by peroxidative damage to phospholipids containing polyunsaturated fatty acids in cell membranes, has been found to be a relevant death response triggered by tumour RT in recent years. In the present review, an overview of the current knowledge on RT and combination therapy and iron death in HNSCC was provided, the mechanisms by which RT induces iron death in tumour cells were summarized, and therapeutic strategies to target iron death in HNSCC were explored. The current review provided important information for future studies of iron death in the treatment of HNSCC.

Optimization of the Mixed Gas Detection Method Based on Neural Network Algorithm.

Real-time mixed gas detection has attracted significant interest for being a key factor for applications of the electronic nose (E-nose). However, mixed gas detection still faces the challenge of long detection time and a large amount of training data. Therefore, in this work, we propose a feasible way to realize low-cost fast detection of mixed gases, which uses only the part response data of the adsorption process as the training set. Our results indicated that the proposed method significantly reduced the number of training sets and the prediction time of mixed gas. Moreover, it can achieve new concentration prediction of mixed gas using only the response data of the first 10 s, and the training set proportion can reduce to 60%. In addition, the convolutional neural network model can realize both the smaller training set but also the higher accuracy of mixed gas. Our findings provide an effective way to improve the detection efficiency and accuracy of E-noses for the experimental measurement.

Simulation of gas transport in a landfill with layered new and old municipal solid waste.

Average biodegradation rate of newly filled municipal solid waste (MSW) in landfills is relatively fast, and the landfill gas produced by the new MSW biodegradation can cause great variations in gas pressure. To predict the gas pressure distribution in the MSW layer, a one-dimensional gas transport model is established in this study. The following factors are considered in this model: (1) the variation of gas permeability with depth; (2) the anisotropy ratio of gas permeability; (3) the settlement caused by waste biodegradation. Furthermore, a single peak model for gas production is applied as the source term of gas production. The equation for settlement caused by waste biodegradation is presented, and the time of peak gas production rate is obtained by fitting the settlement of the newly filled layer. The stratification of the unsaturated and saturated regions is taken into account by distinguishing the difference in gas saturation. The layering of the new and old waste layers is considered by distinguishing the difference in the length of time that waste has been degraded to produce gas. Based on the method of numerical calculation, the gas pressure distribution in the landfill with layered new and old MSW is well simulated. The position where the maximum gas pressure occurs is found. The sensitivity analysis shows that the influence of the anisotropy ratio on gas pressure distribution is more significant.

Investigation on the Cooling and Evaporation Behavior of Semi-Flexible Water Retaining Pavement based on Laboratory Test and Thermal-Mass Coupling Analysis.

The Semi-Flexible Water Retaining Pavement (SFWRP) has the capability to cool down the temperature of the road surface through its evaporation behavior, including absorbing and evaporating water; this is an efficient approach to relieve the heat island effect in a big city. The temperature feedback from different material surface were investigated in this paper in the same test condition, it has been proved that the SFWRP material can remarkably cool down the temperature of the road surface. The mechanism of the material evaporation behavior, including flux calculation formula of the water vapor inside the air void, were studied by inter-phase continuous function, in which the structural properties of the SFWRP material was taken into account. Furthermore, the function calculating the evaporation of the water vapor was then developed in this research through heat and mass transfer analogy. Besides, the calculating results can be captured by the self-coding program in Finite Element Modeling (FEM) for water evaporation simulation. Also, the results of laboratory tests were adopted to validate the calculating model. Finally, it has been proved that the mortar was recommended to be used in semi-flexible water retaining pavement to serve as material with permeable and water retaining property, and the semi-flexible water retaining pavement material is recommended to applied in the surface layer of the permeable pavement.

The Value of Diffusion-Weighted Imaging in Combination With Conventional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Improving Tumor Detection for Early Cervical Carcinoma Treated With Fertility-Sparing Surgery.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the value of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) in combination with conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for improving tumor detection in young patients treated with fertility-sparing surgery because of early cervical carcinoma. METHODS: Fifty-four patients with stage Ia or Ib1 cervical carcinoma were enrolled into this study. Magnetic resonance examinations were performed for these patients using conventional MRI (including T1-weighted imaging, T2-weighted imaging, and dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI) and DWI. The apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values of cervical carcinoma were analyzed quantitatively and compared with that of adjacent epithelium. Sensitivity, positive predictive value, and accuracy of 2 sets of MRI sequences were calculated on the basis of histologic results, and the diagnostic ability of conventional MRI/DWI combinations was compared with that of conventional MRI. RESULTS: The mean ADC value from cervical carcinoma (mean, 786 × 10 mm/s ± 100) was significantly lower than that from adjacent epithelium (mean, 1352 × 10 mm/s ± 147) (P = 0.01). When the threshold ADC value set as 1010 × 10 mm/s, the sensitivity and specificity for differentiating cervical carcinoma from nontumor epithelium were 78.2% and 67.2%, respectively. The sensitivity and accuracy of conventional MRI for tumor detection were 76.0% and 70.4%, whereas the sensitivity and accuracy of conventional MRI/DWI combinations were 91.7% and 90.7%, respectively. Conventional MRI/DWI combinations revealed a positive predictive value of 97.8% and only 4 false-negative findings. CONCLUSIONS: The addition of DWI to conventional MRI considerably improves the sensitivity and accuracy of tumor detection in young patients treated with fertility-sparing surgery, which supports the inclusion quantitative analysis of ADC value in routine MRI protocol before fertility-sparing surgery.