Investigation of the usefulness of a bile duct biopsy and bile cytology using a hyperspectral camera and machine learning.

To improve the efficiency of pathological diagnoses, the development of automatic pathological diagnostic systems using artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing; however, problems include the low interpretability of AI technology and the need for large amounts of data. We herein report the usefulness of a general-purpose method that combines a hyperspectral camera with machine learning. As a result of analyzing bile duct biopsy and bile cytology specimens, which are especially difficult to determine as benign or malignant, using multiple machine learning models, both were able to identify benign or malignant cells with an accuracy rate of more than 80% (93.3% for bile duct biopsy specimens and 83.2% for bile cytology specimens). This method has the potential to contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of bile duct cancer and is expected to be widely applied and utilized in general pathological diagnoses.

Application of the cis-regulatory region of a heat-shock protein 70 gene to heat-inducible gene expression in the ascidian Ciona intestinalis.

Temporally controlled induction of gene expression is a useful technique for analyzing gene function. To make such a technique possible in Ciona intestinalis embryos, we employed the cis-regulatory region of the heat-shock protein 70 (HSP70) gene Ci-HSPA1/6/7-like for heat-inducible gene expression in C. intestinalis embryos. We showed that Ci-HSPA1/6/7-like becomes heat shock-inducible by the 32-cell stage during embryogenesis. The 5'-upstream region of Ci-HSPA1/6/7-like, which contains heat-shock elements indispensable for heat-inducible gene expression, induces the heat shock-dependent expression of a reporter gene in the whole embryo from the 32-cell to the middle gastrula stages and in progressively restricted areas of embryos in subsequent stages. We assessed the effects of heat-shock treatments in different conditions on the normality of embryos and induction of transgene expression. We evaluated the usefulness of this technique through overexpression experiments on the well-characterized, developmentally relevant gene, Ci-Bra, and showed that this technique is applicable for inferring the gene function in C. intestinalis.