Suture Bridge Technique with 5-Ethibond: A Promising Approach for Infrapatellar Pole Fracture Treatment.

Purpose: Infrapatellar pole fractures are challenging injuries that require appropriate treatment to ensure optimal functional outcomes. This study aimed to introduce the application of the Suture Bridge technique using the 5-Ethibond for the treatment of infrapatellar patella fracture. Methods: Five cases of infrapatellar pole fracture that were treated at our institution between February 2020 and September 2021. The patients included one male and four females, with an average age of 66 years (range: 60-77 years). All patients were treated with the Suture Bridge technique using the 5-Ethibond to preserve the infrapatellar pole. Results: The average operative time was 64 min (range: 50-80 min). The average blood loss during surgery was 51 mL (range: 40-60 mL). All cases demonstrated fracture healing at an average of 10 weeks (range 8-12) after surgery. The patients were followed up for an average period of 14.8 months (8-22). No wound infection or second displacement of fracture fragment was found. Full range of motion was restored in all patients within 12-14 weeks after surgery. None of the patients complained of anterior knee pain. Conclusions: Based on the findings of the study, it appears that the Suture Bridge technique using 5-Ethibond is a promising and viable option for the treatment of infrapatellar pole fractures.

Minimally Invasive Delivery of Percutaneous Ablation Agent via Magnetic Colloidal Hydrogel Injection for Treatment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

Percutaneous thermotherapy, a minimally invasive operational procedure, is employed in the ablation of deep tumor lesions by means of target-delivering heat. Conventional thermal ablation methods, such as radiofrequency or microwave ablation, to a certain extent, are subjected to extended ablation time as well as biosafety risks of unwanted overheating. Given its effectiveness and safety, percutaneous thermotherapy gains a fresh perspective, thanks to magnetic hyperthermia. In this respect, an injectable- and magnetic-hydrogel-construct-based thermal ablation agent is likely to be a candidate for the aforementioned clinical translation. Adopting a simple and environment-friendly strategy, a magnetic colloidal hydrogel injection is introduced by a binary system comprising super-paramagnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles and gelatin nanoparticles. The colloidal hydrogel constructs, unlike conventional bulk hydrogel, can be easily extruded through a percutaneous needle and then self-heal in a reversible manner owing to the unique electrostatic cross-linking. The introduction of magnetic building blocks is exhibited with a rapid magnetothermal response to an alternating magnetic field. Such hydrogel injection is capable of generating heat without limitation of deep penetration. The materials achieve outstanding therapeutic results in mouse and rabbit models. These findings constitute a new class of locoregional interventional thermal therapies with minimal collateral damages.

Methylation changes of liver DNA during the formation of gallstones.

Aim: To explore the overall methylation changes in liver tissues during the formation of gallstones, as well as the key pathways and genes involved in the process. Methods: Reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing and RNA sequencing were conducted on the liver tissues of mice with gallstones and control normal mice. Results: A total of 8705 differentially methylated regions in CpG and 1410 differentially expressed genes were identified. The joint analysis indicated that aberrant DNA methylation may be associated with dysregulated gene expression in key pathways such as cholesterol metabolism and bile secretion. Conclusion: We propose for the first time that methylation changes in some key pathway genes in liver tissue may be involved in the formation of gallstones.

Rigid-flexible coupling network solid polymer electrolytes for all-solid-state lithium metal batteries.

Poor mechanical strength at working temperature and low ionic conductivity seriously hinder the application of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)-based solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) in high performance all-solid-state lithium metal batteries (LMBs). Here, we design and prepare a series of rigid-flexible coupling network SPEs (RFN-SPEs) with soft poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) chains and rigid crosslinkers containing the benzene structure. Compared with soft crosslinkers, rigid crosslinkers provide the same amount of active crosslinking points with smaller molecular weight, and meanwhile enhance the mechanical strength of the network. Therefore, based on the rigid crosslinkers, RFN-SPEs exhibit synchronously improved ionic conductivity and mechanical strength. With these RFN-SPEs, symmetrical cells can be cycled for over 2100 h at 0.5 mA cm-2. Meanwhile, stable cycling and high-rate capability could be achieved for LMBs, revealing that SPEs with the rigid-flexible coupling network are promising electrolyte systems for all-solid-state LMBs.

Injectable Hydrogels Including Magnetic Nanosheets for Multidisciplinary Treatment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma via Magnetic Hyperthermia.

Relapse and unresectability have become the main obstacle for further improving hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) treatment effect. Currently, single therapy for HCC in clinical practice is limited by postoperative recurrence, intraoperative blood loss and poor patient outcomes. Multidisciplinary therapy has been recognized as the key to improving the long-term survival rate for HCC. However, the clinical application of HCC synthetic therapy is restricted by single functional biomaterials. In this study, a magnetic nanocomposite hydrogel (CG-IM) with iron oxide nanoparticle-loaded mica nanosheets (Iron oxide nanoparticles@Mica, IM) is reported. This biocompatible magnetic hydrogel integrated high injectability, magnetocaloric property, mechanical robustness, wet adhesion, and hemostasis, leading to efficient HCC multidisciplinary therapies including postoperative tumor margin treatment and percutaneous locoregional ablation. After minimally invasive hepatectomy of HCC, the CG-IM hydrogel can facilely seal the bleeding hepatic margin, followed by magnetic hyperthermia ablation to effectively prevent recurrence. In addition, CG-IM hydrogel can inhibit unresectable HCC by magnetic hyperthermia through the percutaneous intervention under ultrasound guidance.

Endoscopic ultrasound guided gastroenterostomy: Technical details updates, clinical outcomes, and adverse events.

Endoscopic ultrasound-guided gastroenterostomy (EUS-GE) has been transformed from an innovative technique, into a viable alternative to enteral stenting and surgical gastrointestinal anastomosis for patients with gastric outlet obstruction. Even EUS-GE guided ERCP and EUS-guided gastrointestinal anastomosis for the treatment of afferent loop syndrome have been performed, giving patients more less invasive options. However, EUS-GE is still a technically challenging procedure. In order to improve EUS-GE, several techniques have been reported to improve the technical details. With EUS-GE widely performed, more data about EUS-GE's clinical outcomes have been reported. The aim of the current review is to describe technical details updates, clinical outcomes, and adverse events of EUS-GE.

Incorporating entity-level knowledge in pretrained language model for biomedical dense retrieval.

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dominated natural language processing (NLP) and achieved outstanding performance in various NLP tasks, including dense retrieval based on PLMs. However, in the biomedical domain, the effectiveness of dense retrieval models based on PLMs still needs to be improved due to the diversity and ambiguity of entity expressions caused by the enrichment of biomedical entities. To alleviate the semantic gap, in this paper, we propose a method that incorporates external knowledge at the entity level into a dense retrieval model to enrich the dense representations of queries and documents. Specifically, we first add additional self-attention and information interaction modules in the Transformer layer of the BERT architecture to perform fusion and interaction between query/document text and entity embeddings from knowledge graphs. We then propose an entity similarity loss to constrain the model to better learn external knowledge from entity embeddings, and further propose a weighted entity concatenation mechanism to balance the impact of entity representations when matching queries and documents. Experiments on two publicly available biomedical retrieval datasets show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods. In term of NDCG metrics, the proposed method (called ELK) improves the ranking performance of coCondenser by at least 5% on both two datasets, and also obtains further performance gain over state-of-the-art EVA methods. Though having a more sophisticated architecture, the average query latency of ELK is still within the same order of magnitude as that of other efficient methods.

Different doses of vitamin D supplementation to nonsurgical treatment for vitamin-D-insufficient patients with diabetic periodontitis and the effect on gingival BMP-2 levels.

Epidemiological data show people with diabetes mellitus (DM) have three-fold increase in risk of periodontitis. A vitamin D insufficiency can affect the progression of DM and periodontitis. This study evaluated the effects of different-dose vitamin D supplementation to nonsurgical periodontal therapy for vitamin-D-insufficient diabetic patients coexisting with periodontitis and changes of gingival bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2) levels. The study included 30 vitamin-D-insufficient patients receiving nonsurgical treatment followed by administration of 25,000 international units (IU) vitamin D3 per week (the low-VD group) and 30 patients receiving 50,000 UI vitamin D per week (the high-VD group). The decreases of probing pocket depth, clinical attachment loss, bleeding index, and periodontal plaque index values of patients after the six-month supplementation of 50,000 UI vitamin D3 per week to nonsurgical treatment were more significant than those after the six-month supplementation of 25,000 UI vitamin D3 per week to nonsurgical treatment. It was found that 50,000 IU per week vitamin D supplementation for 6 months could lead to a better glycemic control for vitamin-D-insufficient diabetic patients coexisting with periodontitis after nonsurgical periodontal therapy. Increased levels of serum 25(OH) vitamin D3 and gingival BMP-2 were found in both low- and high-dose VD groups, and the high-dose VD group exhibited higher levels than the low-dose VD group. Vitamin D supplementation in large doses for 6 months tended to improve the treatment of periodontitis and increase gingival BMP-2 levels in diabetic patients coexisting with periodontitis who were vitamin D deficient.

Exogenous application of melatonin to mitigate drought stress-induced oxidative damage in Phoebe sheareri seedlings.

Background: Drought stress is a major prevalent environmental factor impairing growth. Melatonin mitigates the impacts of drought stress on plants. However, melatonin's role in Phoebe sheareri (Hemsl.) Gamble (P. sheareri) is unknown. We aimed to reveal the protective effects of melatonin on P. sheareri seedlings under drought conditions. Methods: Melatonin was sprayed under drought or normal water conditions. The parameters, including growth, physiological factors, and phytohormones of P. sheareri, were examined. Results: Compared to the normal control group, drought stress inhibited the growth of seedlings and significantly reduced the content of carotenoids, SOD, POD, APX, PPO, CAT, GR, and soluble sugars, and increased the contents of MDA, O2 •-, proline, soluble proteins, ABA, and JA-Me in P. sheareri seedlings. However, melatonin treatment significantly reversed the adverse drought-induced responses and promoted the P. sheareri seedling's growth. Moreover, the heatmap and principal component analysis suggested a high similarity in the behavior patterns of the six measured antioxidant enzymes in P. sheareri seedlings. Conclusion: Our study reported for the first time that melatonin has a protective role in P. sheareri seedlings under drought-stress conditions. This role is related to ROS scavenging, activation of antioxidant enzymes, and crosstalk of phytohormones. This study provided a theoretical basis for improving the ability of P. sheareri adapted to arid environments.

Mechanistic Insight into the Synergy between Platinum Single Atom and Cluster Dual Active Sites Boosting Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution.

In the energy transition context, the design and synthesis of high-performance Pt-based photocatalysts with low Pt content and ultrahigh atom-utilization efficiency for hydrogen production are essential. Herein, a facile approach for decorating atomically dispersed Pt cocatalysts having single-atom (SA) and atomic cluster (C) dual active sites on CdS nanorods (PtSA+C /CdS) via atomic layer deposition is reported. The size of the cocatalyst and the spatial intimacy of the cocatalyst active sites are precisely engineered at the atomic scale. The PtSA+C /CdS photocatalysts show the optimized photocatalytic hydrogen evolution activity, achieving a reaction rate of 80.4 mmol h-1 g-1 , which is 1.6- and 7.3-fold higher than those of the PtSA /CdS and PtNP /CdS photocatalysts, respectively. Thorough characterization and theoretical calculations reveal that the enhanced photocatalytic activity is due to a remarkable synergy between SAs and atomic clusters as dual active sites, which are responsible for water adsorption-dissociation and hydrogen desorption, respectively. A similar synergetic effect is found in a representative Pt/TiO2 system, indicating the generality of the strategy. This study demonstrates the significance of the synergy between active sites for enhancing the reaction efficiency, opening a new avenue for the rational design of atomically dispersed photocatalysts with high efficiency.

Identifying suicide attempts, ideation, and non-ideation in major depressive disorder from structural MRI data using deep learning.

The present study aims to identify suicide risks in major depressive disorders (MDD) patients from structural MRI (sMRI) data using deep learning. In this paper, we collected the sMRI data of 288 MDD patients, including 110 patients with suicide ideation (SI), 93 patients with suicide attempts (SA), and 85 patients without suicidal ideation or attempts (NS). And we developed interpretable deep neural network models to classify patients in three tasks including SA-versus-SI, SA-versus-NS, and SI-versus-NS, respectively. Furthermore, we interpreted the models by extracting the important features that contributed most to the classification, and further discussed these features or ROI/brain regions.

Line-Features-Based Pose Estimation Method for the Disc Cutter Holder of Shield Machine.

To achieve automatic disc cutter replacement of shield machines, measuring the accurate pose of the disc cutter holder by machine vision is crucial. However, under polluted and restricted illumination conditions, achieving pose estimation by vision is a great challenge. This paper proposes a line-features-based pose estimation method for the disc cutter holder of the shield machine by using a monocular camera. For the blurring effect of rounded corners on the image edge, a rounded edge model is established to obtain edge points that better match the 3D model of the workpiece. To obtain the edge search box corresponding to each edge, a contour separation method based on an adaptive threshold region growing method is proposed. By preprocesses on the edge points of each edge, the efficiency and the accuracy of RANSAC linear fitting are improved. The experimental result shows that the proposed pose estimation method is highly reliable and can meet the measurement accuracy requirements in practical engineering applications.

Formin-like 2 promotes angiogenesis and metastasis of colorectal cancer by regulating the EGFL6/CKAP4/ERK axis.

Increasing evidence indicates that angiogenesis plays a pivotal role in tumor progression. Formin-like 2 (FMNL2) is well-known for promoting metastasis; however, the molecular mechanisms by which FMNL2 promotes angiogenesis in colorectal cancer (CRC) remain unclear. Here, we found that FMNL2 promotes angiogenesis and metastasis of CRC in vitro and in vivo. The GDB/FH3 domain of FMNL2 directly interacts with epidermal growth factor-like protein 6 (EGFL6). Formin-like 2 promotes EGFL6 paracrine signaling by exosomes to regulate angiogenesis in CRC. Cytoskeleton associated protein 4 (CKAP4) is a downstream target of EGFL6 and is involved in CRC angiogenesis. Epidermal growth factor-like protein 6 binds to the N-terminus of CKAP4 to promote the migration of HUVECs by activating the ERK/MMP pathway. These findings suggest that FMNL2 promotes the migration of HUVECs and enhances angiogenesis and tumorigenesis in CRC by regulating the EGFL6/CKAP4/ERK axis. Therefore, the EGFL6/CKAP4/ERK axis could be a candidate therapeutic target for CRC treatment.