Cancer Cell Membrane-Based Materials for Biomedical Applications.

The nanodelivery system provides a novel direction for disease diagnosis and treatment; however, its delivery effectiveness is restricted by the short biological half-life and inadequate tumor targeting. The immune evasion properties and homologous targeting capabilities of natural cell membranes, particularly those of cancer cell membranes (CCM), have gained significant interest. The integration of CCM and nanoparticles has resulted in the emergence of CCM-based nanoplatforms (CCM-NPs), which have gained significant attention due to their unique properties. CCM-NPs not only prolong the blood circulation time of core nanoparticles, but also direct them for homologous tumor targeting. Herein, the history and development of CCM-NPs as well as how these platforms have been used for biomedical applications are discussed. The application of CCM-NPs for cancer therapy will be described in detail. Translational efforts are currently under way and further research to address key areas of need will ultimately be required to facilitate the successful clinical adoption of CCM-NPs.

Severe erosive lesion of the glenoid in gouty shoulder arthritis: a case report and review of the literature.

BACKGROUND: Gout is a metabolic disease characterized by recurrent episodes of acute arthritis. Gout has been reported in many locations but is rarely localized in the shoulder joint. We describe a rare case of gouty arthritis involving bilateral shoulder joints and leading to severe destructive changes in the right shoulder glenoid. CASE PRESENTATION: A 62-year-old male was referred for pain and weakness in the right shoulder joint for two years, and the pain had increased in severity over the course of approximately nine months. A clinical examination revealed gout nodules on both feet and elbows. A laboratory examination showed a high erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), high levels of C-reactive protein and hyperuricemia, and an imaging examination showed severe osteolytic destruction of the right shoulder glenoid and posterior humeral head subluxation. In addition, the left humeral head was involved and had a lytic lesion. Because a definite diagnosis could not be made for this patient, a right shoulder biopsy was performed. The pathological examination of the specimen revealed uric acid crystal deposits and granulomatous inflammation surrounding the deposits. After excluding infectious and neoplastic diseases, the patient was finally diagnosed with gouty shoulder arthritis. CONCLUSIONS: Gout affecting the bilateral shoulder joints is exceedingly uncommon, and to our knowledge, severe erosion of the glenoid has not been previously reported. When severe erosion is present, physicians and orthopedic surgeons should consider gouty shoulder arthritis according to previous medical history and clinical manifestations.

Discovering treatment pattern in Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical cases by exploiting supervised topic model and domain knowledge.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the prescription is the crystallization of clinical experience of doctors, which is the main way to cure diseases in China for thousands of years. Clinical cases, on the other hand, describe how doctors diagnose and prescribe. In this paper, we propose a framework which mines treatment patterns in TCM clinical cases by exploiting supervised topic model and TCM domain knowledge. The framework can reflect principle rules in TCM and improve function prediction of a new prescription. We evaluate our method on 3090 real world TCM clinical cases. The experiment validates the effectiveness of our method.

Three-dimensional gait analysis of orthopaedic common foot and ankle joint diseases.

Walking is an indispensable mode of transportation for human survival. Gait is a characteristic of walking. In the clinic, patients with different diseases exhibit different gait characteristics. Gait analysis describes the specific situation of human gait abnormalities by observing and studying the kinematics and dynamics of limbs and joints during human walking and depicting the corresponding geometric curves and values. In foot and ankle diseases, gait analysis can evaluate the degree and nature of gait abnormalities in patients and provide an important basis for the diagnosis of patients' diseases, the correction of abnormal gait and related treatment methods. This article reviews the relevant literature, expounds on the clinical consensus on gait, and summarizes the gait characteristics of patients with common ankle and foot diseases. Starting from the gait characteristics of individuals with different diseases, we hope to provide support and reference for the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of clinically related diseases.

Application strategy of finite element analysis in artificial knee arthroplasty.

Artificial knee arthroplasty, as the most effective method for the treatment of end-stage joint diseases such as knee osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, is widely used in the field of joint surgery. At present, Finite element analysis (FEA) has been widely used in artificial knee replacement biomechanical research. This review presents the current hotspots for the application of FEA in the field of artificial knee replacement by reviewing the existing research literature and, by comparison, summarizes guidance and recommendations for artificial knee replacement surgery. We believe that lower contact stress can produce less wear and complications when components move against each other, in the process of total knee arthroplasty (TKA), mobile-bearing prostheses reduce the contact surface stress of the tibial-femoral joint compared with fixed-bearing prostheses, thus reducing the wear of the polyethylene insert. Compared with mechanical alignment, kinematic alignment reduces the maximum stress and maximum strain of the femoral component and polyethylene insert in TKA, and the lower stress reduces the wear of the joint contact surface and prolongs the life of the prosthesis. In the unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA), the femoral and tibial components of mobile-bearing prostheses have better conformity, which can reduce the wear of the components, while local stress concentration caused by excessive overconformity of fixed-bearing prostheses should be avoided in UKA to prevent accelerated wear of the components, the mobile-bearing prosthesis maintained in the coronal position from 4° varus to 4° valgus and the fixed-bearing prosthesis implanted in the neutral position (0°) are recommended. In revision total knee arthroplasty (RTKA), the stem implant design should maintain the best balance between preserving bone and reducing stress around the prosthesis after implantation. Compared with cemented stems, cementless press-fit femoral stems show higher fretting, for tibial plateau bone defects, porous metal blocks are more effective in stress dispersion. Finally, compared with traditional mechanical research methods, FEA methods can yield relatively accurate simulations, which could compensate for the deficiencies of traditional mechanics in knee joint research. Thus, FEA has great potential for applications in the field of medicine.

The effects of different repair methods for a posterior root tear of the lateral meniscus on the biomechanics of the knee: a finite element analysis.

PURPOSE: To explore the impact of different repair methods for a lateral meniscus posterior root tear on the biomechanics of the knee joint using finite element analysis. METHODS: Finite element models of a healthy knee were established on the basis of MRI data from a volunteer using Mimics software, and the validity of the models was tested. The changes in the contact mechanics and kinematics of these finite element models under different repair approaches were then analyzed and compared. RESULTS: The normal meniscus had the maximum joint contact area, the minimum contact pressure, and the minimum contact stress. When total meniscectomy of the lateral meniscus was performed, the lateral compartment had the minimum joint contact area, the maximum contact pressure and the maximum contact stress. When complete avulsions of the posterior root of the lateral meniscus occurred, the maximum values of contact pressure and contact stress were between those of an intact meniscus and those of a meniscus treated with total meniscectomy. Lateral meniscal root attachment reconstruction by the single-stitch and double-stitch techniques resulted in a significant decrease in joint contact pressure and contact stress, leading to values comparable to those of a normal knee joint, and the double-stitch technique performed better than the single-stitch technique. CONCLUSIONS: Repair surgery for lateral meniscal posterior root avulsions can effectively restore the contact mechanics and kinematics of the knee joint, and the double-stitch technique can result in better clinical outcomes than the single-stitch technique.

Comparison of Tibial Tuberosity-Trochlear Groove (TT-TG) distances between different anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions: A retrospective clinical and imaging study.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies showed that compared with single-bundle (SB) precedures, double-bundle (DB) anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction perform better. OBJECTIVE: To make assurance that distance of TT-TG may be altered along with ACL rupture and reconstruction. METHODS: Imaging study of 201 patients's related cases by MRI and CT scans. RESULTS: Compared with the intact knee's overall mean TT-TG value, the mean overall pre/postoperative TT-TG values showed a significant difference. For SB reconstruction, the mean pre/postoperative TT-TG values were 15.67± 2.46 mm and 14.72± 2.48 mm, respectively. Postoperative and intact knee TT-TG values were significantly different (p< 0.001). For DB reconstruction, the pre/postoperative mean TT-TG values were 15.11± 1.99 mm and 13.11± 1.71 mm. Postoperative and intact knee TT-TG values were not significantly different (p= 0.141). CONCLUSIONS: The increased TT-TG value from a ruptured ACL was significantly restored after ACL reconstruction. The TT-TG value after SB reconstruction was still obviously larger than that of the intact knee. It showed no significant difference between the postoperative TT-TG of the DB group and intact knees. The original TT-TG values of the knees were much closer to restoration after DB reconstruction.

Improve word embedding using both writing and pronunciation.

Text representation can map text into a vector space for subsequent use in numerical calculations and processing tasks. Word embedding is an important component of text representation. Most existing word embedding models focus on writing and utilize context, weight, dependency, morphology, etc., to optimize the training. However, from the linguistic point of view, spoken language is a more direct expression of semantics; writing has meaning only as a recording of spoken language. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of a pronunciation-enhanced word embedding model (PWE) that integrates speech information into training to fully apply the roles of both speech and writing to meaning. This paper uses the Chinese language, English language and Spanish language as examples and presents several models that integrate word pronunciation characteristics into word embedding. Word similarity and text classification experiments show that the PWE outperforms the baseline model that does not include speech information. Language is a storehouse of sound-images; therefore, the PWE can be applied to most languages.

Dependency-based Siamese long short-term memory network for learning sentence representations.

Textual representations play an important role in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The efficiency of NLP tasks, such as text comprehension and information extraction, can be significantly improved with proper textual representations. As neural networks are gradually applied to learn the representation of words and phrases, fairly efficient models of learning short text representations have been developed, such as the continuous bag of words (CBOW) and skip-gram models, and they have been extensively employed in a variety of NLP tasks. Because of the complex structure generated by the longer text lengths, such as sentences, algorithms appropriate for learning short textual representations are not applicable for learning long textual representations. One method of learning long textual representations is the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is suitable for processing sequences. However, the standard LSTM does not adequately address the primary sentence structure (subject, predicate and object), which is an important factor for producing appropriate sentence representations. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes the dependency-based LSTM model (D-LSTM). The D-LSTM divides a sentence representation into two parts: a basic component and a supporting component. The D-LSTM uses a pre-trained dependency parser to obtain the primary sentence information and generate supporting components, and it also uses a standard LSTM model to generate the basic sentence components. A weight factor that can adjust the ratio of the basic and supporting components in a sentence is introduced to generate the sentence representation. Compared with the representation learned by the standard LSTM, the sentence representation learned by the D-LSTM contains a greater amount of useful information. The experimental results show that the D-LSTM is superior to the standard LSTM for sentences involving compositional knowledge (SICK) data.

Blood loss of total knee arthroplasty in osteoarthritis: an analysis of influential factors.

BACKGROUND: Total knee arthroplasty is regarded as the most effective treatment for severe knee osteoarthritis. The influential factors of blood loss in total knee arthroplasty remain controversial. The study aims to explore the influential factors of blood loss in total knee arthroplasty comprehensively. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Three hundred and four osteoarthritis patients undergoing unilateral primary total knee arthroplasty were enrolled. Demographic characteristics, laboratory results, surgical protocol, and hemostatic and anticoagulation drugs were collected. Estimation of blood loss was calculated using the Gross equation. Multivariable stepwise linear regression analysis was performed to find out the influential factors. RESULTS: Total blood loss reached the biggest volume (1346 ± 671 mL) in the post-operative third day. Hidden blood loss reached 465 ± 358 mL. Gender, tranexamic acid, prosthesis type, and drainage were proven to be positively correlated with the total blood loss (all P < 0.05). Male appeared to suffer more surgical blood loss than female. Posterior cruciate stabilizing prosthesis might lead to more surgical blood loss than posterior cruciate retaining prosthesis. Tranexamic acid could effectively reduce total blood loss while drainage might increase bleeding. Gender and anticoagulation drugs were correlated with hidden blood loss (both P < 0.05). Low molecular weight heparin resulted in less hidden blood loss than rivaroxaban. CONCLUSIONS: Posterior cruciate retaining prosthesis and topical use of tranexamic acid were preferred to reduce total blood loss. Drainage was not recommended due to the risk of increasing bleeding. Low molecular weight heparin was recommended to prevent venous thrombosis.

Regularization Based Iterative Point Match Weighting for Accurate Rigid Transformation Estimation.

Feature extraction and matching (FEM) for 3D shapes finds numerous applications in computer graphics and vision for object modeling, retrieval, morphing, and recognition. However, unavoidable incorrect matches lead to inaccurate estimation of the transformation relating different datasets. Inspired by AdaBoost, this paper proposes a novel iterative re-weighting method to tackle the challenging problem of evaluating point matches established by typical FEM methods. Weights are used to indicate the degree of belief that each point match is correct. Our method has three key steps: (i) estimation of the underlying transformation using weighted least squares, (ii) penalty parameter estimation via minimization of the weighted variance of the matching errors, and (iii) weight re-estimation taking into account both matching errors and information learnt in previous iterations. A comparative study, based on real shapes captured by two laser scanners, shows that the proposed method outperforms four other state-of-the-art methods in terms of evaluating point matches between overlapping shapes established by two typical FEM methods, resulting in more accurate estimates of the underlying transformation. This improved transformation can be used to better initialize the iterative closest point algorithm and its variants, making 3D shape registration more likely to succeed.

Developing rigid constraint for the estimation of pose and structure from a single image.

Pose and structure estimation from a single image is a fundamental problem in machine vision and multiple sensor fusion and integration. In this paper we propose using rigid constraints described in different coordinate frames to iteratively estimate structural and camera pose parameters. Using geometric properties of reflected correspondences we put forward a new concept, the reflected pole of a rigid transformation. The reflected pole represents a general analysis of transformations that can be applied to both 2D and 3D transformations. We demonstrate how the concept is applied to calibration by proposing an iterative method to estimate the structural parameters of objects. The method is based on a coarse-to-fine strategy in which initial estimation is obtained through a classical linear algorithm which is then refined by iteration. For a comparative study of performance, we also implemented an extended motion estimation algorithm (from 2D-2D to 3D-2D case) based on epipolar geometry.

Application of uncemented Zweymüller hip prosthesis in adult patients with hip osteoarthritis secondary to developmental dysplasia.

BACKGROUND: Developmental dysplasia encompasses a wide spectrum of hip pathology ranging from a shallow acetabulum to a completely dislocated 'high-riding' hip. It is a common cause of secondary osteoarthritis in young adults and is the underlying diagnosis in up to 48% of patients requiring total hip arthroplasty (THA) for coxarthrosis. The aim of this study was to evaluate efficiency and safety of THA using Zweymüller hip implant in the treatment of severe osteoarthritis secondary to developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in adults. METHODS: From January 2000 to February 2008, 35 patients (40 hips) with developmental dysplasia of the hip were included. Five were male and 30 were female, with ages ranging from 26 to 65 years and an average age of 45 years. According to Hartofilakidis classification, there were type I in 5 hips, type II in 20 hips, type III in 15 hips. All the patients were performed the THA using the Zweymüller hip implant. The preoperative average Harris score was 44. The bilateral arthroplasty was performed in 5 patients and the unilateral arthroplasty in 30 patients. The patients mainly suffered from pain and claudication. Clinical and radiological results were analyzed. The Harris score was used for outcome measurement. RESULTS: Thirty five patients (40 hips) were followed and the mean follow-up period was 46 months (ranged from 24 months to 96 months). The latest follow-up average Harris score was 88.9 (97.1% of good rate). All the patients were pain-free and there was no sign of infection, aseptic loosening and subsidence. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, THA using Zweymüller hip implant is a good treatment method for severe osteoarthritis secondary to DDH in adults. The key techniques for the total hip replacement are as follows: good preoperative plan, firmly placing the acetabular component in the true acetabulum, proper preparation of proximal femur, suitable femoral component choosing and improving the techniques of the bone graft.

[Influence of posterior condylar offset and anteroposterior femorotibial translation on knee flexion after posterior cruciate-sacrificing self alignment bearing total knee arthroplasty].

OBJECTIVE: To observe the posterior condylar offset (PCO) changes and anteroposterior femorotibial translation, to investigate the influence of them on the maximum knee range of flexion (ROF) in patients with posterior cruciate-sacrificing self alignment bearing total knee arthroplasty (TKA). METHODS: The clinical data were analyzed retrospectively from 40 patients (40 knees) undergoing primary unilateral TC-PLUS SB posterior cruciate-sacrificing self alignment and bearing TKA for osteoarthritis between January 2007 and June 2009. There were 18 males and 22 females with an average age of 70.6 years (range, 56-87 years). The disease duration was 5-14 years (mean, 9.1 years). The locations were the left side in 11 cases and the right side in 29 cases. Preoperative knee society score (KSS) and ROF were 48.0 +/- 5.5 and (77.9 +/- 9.0) degrees, respectively. The X-ray films were taken to measure PCO and anteroposterior femorotibial translation. Multiple regression analysis was performed based on both the anteroposterior femorotibial translation and PCO changes as the independent variable, and maximum knee flexion as the dependent variable. RESULTS: All incisions healed by first intention. The patients were followed up 12-19 months (mean, 14.7 months). At last follow-up, there were significant differences in the KSS (91.9 +/- 3.7, t = -77.600, P = 0.000), the ROF [(102.0 +/- 9.3) degrees, t = -23.105, P = 0.000] when compared with preoperative values. Significant difference was observed in PCO (t = 3.565, P = 0.001) between before operation [(31.6 +/- 5.5) mm] and at last follow-up [(30.6 +/- 5.9) mm]. At last follow-up, the anteroposterior femorotibial translation was (-1.2 +/- 2.1) mm (95% CI: -1.9 mm to 0.6 mm); femoral roll forward occurred in 27 cases (67.5%), no roll in 1 case (2.5%), and femoral roll back in 12 cases (30.0%). By multiple regression analysis (Stepwise method), the regression equation was established (R = 0.785, R2 = 0.617, F = 61.128, P = 0.000). Anteroposterior femorotibial translation could be introduced into the equation (t = 7.818, P = 0.000), but PCO changes were removed from the equation (t = 1.471, P = 0.150). Regression equation was y = 25.587 + 2.349x. CONCLUSION: Kinematics after TC-PLUS SB posterior cruciate-sacrificing self alignment bearing TKA with posterior cruciate ligament-sacrificing show mostly roll forward of the femur relative to the tibia, which have a negative effect on postoperative range of motion. There is no correlation between PCO changes and postoperative change in ROF in TC-PLUS SB posterior cruciate-sacrificing self alignment bearing TKA.