[Method of surgical treatment of patients with combined pathological tortuosity of the common and internal carotid arteries]. / Sposob khirurgicheskogo lecheniia bol'nykh s sochetaniem patologicheskoi izvitosti obshchei i vnutrennei sonnoi arterii.

Pathological tortuosity of the internal carotid artery ranks next to atherosclerosis amongst causes leading to development of ischaemic strokes. In some patients pathological tortuosity of the internal carotid artery is combined with pathological kinking of the common carotid artery. Existing methods of surgical treatment for such concomitant pathology include stegewise elimination of kinking of the internal then common carotid artery, with two anastomoses sequentially formed, thus increasing the overall duration of arterial cross-clamping an prolonging cerebral ischaemia. Another method consists of resection of the common carotid artery with bringing down its bifurcation, restoration of straightness of the internal carotid artery, and formation of an end-to-end anastomosis. The second technique is often associated with technical requirement for ligation of the external carotid artery. In the presence of prolonged atherosclerotic lesions of the bifurcation of the internal and external carotid arteries, this method does not always allow carrying out adequate endarterectomy and fix the intima of the internal carotid artery distal to the bifurcation. The authors developed a method of surgical treatment of patients with a combination of pathological kinking of carotid arteries, providing herein a detailed description of the procedure of performing an operation according to an original technique. The proposed method of reconstruction makes it possible to eliminate pathological kinking of the common and internal carotid arteries in single cross-clamping of vessels, to preserve patency of the external carotid artery and in the presence of an atherosclerotic lesion of the bifurcation to perform adequate endarterectomy. Over the period from 2015 to 2019, a total of 10 patients were operated on according to this technique at the Municipal Vascular Centre of Samara, with no postoperative complications observed. The proposed technique of a reconstructive operation may be effectively used in patients with cerebral ischaemia in concomitant pathological kinking of the common and internal carotid arteries.

Upregulation of osteoprotegerin expression correlates with bone invasion and predicts poor clinical outcome in oral cancer.

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to determine the prognostic significance of receptor activator of nuclear factor kappa-B ligand (RANKL), RANK and osteoprotegerin (OPG) in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The protein expression of RANKL, RANK and OPG was assessed by immunohistochemistry on pretreatment biopsies of 93 patients with locally advanced OSCC who received preoperative chemoradiotherapy (CRT). The primary endpoint was cancer-specific survival. Secondary endpoints were correlation of biomarkers with bone invasion and pathological tumor response. Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox regression models were used for survival analyses. RESULTS: A significantly higher OPG expression was demonstrated in patients with malignant bone invasion and non-responders to CRT as compared to patients without bone invasion and responders (p=0.032 and p=0.033, respectively). Multivariate analysis revealed that higher OPG expression was independently associated with shorter cancer-specific survival (p=0.04). The expression status of RANKL and RANK was not significantly related to clinicopathological characteristics and had no impact on survival of OSCC patients. CONCLUSION: Upregulation of OPG expression is associated with bone invasion, poor pathological tumor regression to neoadjuvant CRT, and worse long-term cancer-specific survival in patients with locally advanced OSCC. Our results indicate that OPG may be a novel prognostic biomarker in oral cancer.

Quality analysis of selective microparticle deposition on electrically programmable surfaces.

Image processing and pattern analysis can evaluate the deposition quality of triboelectrically charged microparticles on charged surfaces. The image processing method presented in this paper aims at controlling the quality of peptide arrays generated by particle based solid phase Merrifield combinatorial peptide synthesis. Incorrectly deposited particles are detected before the amino acids therein are coupled to the growing peptide. The calibration of the image acquisition is performed in a supervised training step in which all parameters of the quality analyzing algorithm are learnt given one representative image. Then, the correct deposition pattern is determined by a linear support vector machine. Knowing the pattern, contaminated areas can be detected by comparing the pattern with the actual deposition. Taking into account the resolution of the image acquisition system and its magnification factor, the number and size of contaminating particles can be calculated out of the number of connected foreground pixels.

Plastid DNA diversity in natural populations of Beta maritima showing additional variation in sexual phenotype and mitochondrial DNA.

Plants of two natural populations of Beta maritima, characterized by high percentages of male-sterile plants, have been investigated for organelle DNA polymorphism. We confirm the two classes of mitochondrial DNA variation previously described: (i) mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) type N is associated with male fertility, whereas mtDNA type S can cause cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS); (ii) the 10.4-kb linear plasmid is observed in both types of mitochondria and is not correlated with the cytoplasmic male sterility occurring in this plant material. A third polymorphism is now described for chloroplast DNA (ctDNA). This polymorphism occurs within single populations of Beta maritima. Three different ctDNA types have been identified by HindIII restriction analysis. Among the plants studied, ctDNA type 1 is associated with N mitochondria and type 2 with S mitochondria. Chloroplast DNA type 3 has been found both in a fertile N plant and in a sterile S plant. This finding suggests that the chloroplast DNA polymorphism reported is not involved in the expression of male sterility. A comparison with Beta vulgaris indicates that ctDNA type 3 of Beta maritima corresponds to the ctDNA of fertile sugar beet maintainer lines. The three types of Beta maritima ctDNA described in this study differ from the ctDNA of male-sterile sugar beet.