Background. Cutting the sternothyroid (ST) muscle is a useful technique to expose the superior pole of thyroid gland during thyroidectomy. In this study, we evaluated the impact of partial cutting of ...the ST muscle on postoperative vocal outcomes after total thyroidectomy. Methods. A retrospective review of 57 patients who underwent total thyroidectomy with central neck dissection for micropapillary thyroid carcinoma was conducted. Group A (n=26) included those without cutting the ST muscle, while group B (n=31) included patients whose muscle was partially cut at the superior pole. All patients underwent voice analysis before the operation and 2 weeks and 1 month after the surgery, and the outcomes were compared between the two groups. Results. There were no differences between the two groups regarding the outcomes at each time of voice analysis. Group A showed a decrease of maximum frequency 2 weeks after surgery but showed no difference after 1 month. Group B showed a mild decrease in maximum frequency 2 weeks after surgery, but the difference was not significant. Conclusion. Partial cutting of ST muscle during thyroidectomy is useful to expose the superior pole without significant negative impact on postoperative outcomes of vocal analysis.
Inflammation is a significant clinical problem that can arise from full-thickness wounds or burn injuries or microbial disease. Although topical wound healing substances could promote rapid wound ...healing by preventing or reducing the consequences of inflammation, there still remains a need for the development of novel substances that can effectively reduce infection and inflammation in initial wound healing phase. In this study, collagen was combined with asiaticoside (AS) and ε-poly-l-lysine (εPLL). This complex was then applied to in vitro models of infection and inflammation. Collagen-AS coatings inhibited the initial inflammatory response to LPS through a sustained release of AS, and a bilayer coating-εPLL showed a notable antimicrobial effect using microbial infection test. In this study, we determined whether asiaticoside and εPLL have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial effects through different mechanisms. Collectively, the collagen-AS/εPLL complex indicated great therapeutic potentials for accelerate wound healing and the complex may be considered as a artificial scaffold substitute product to full-thickness wound healing.
•We fabricated a substance releasing-collagen complex that have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial effects.•Released of asiaticoside effectively regulated inflammatory cytokines and factors.•Due to bilayed coated ε-poly-l-lysine, the bacterial count was significantly reduced in the bacteria suspension.•Through the results of anti-inflammation and antibacterial effect, the possibility of creating biomedical materials for rapid initial wound healing.
Norovirus is one of the major causes of non-bacterial gastroenteritis in humans. The aim of this study was to analyze the amino acid variation of open reading frame 2 of GII.4 variants in South Korea ...during the period from November 2006 to December 2012. Sixty-nine complete nucleotide sequences of open reading frame 2 were obtained from 113 GII.4 strains. The GII.4 2006b variants were detected predominantly between 2006 and 2009; however, new GII.4 variants, which were termed the 2010 variant and the 2012 variant, emerged in 2010 and 2012, respectively. The number of GII.4 2006b variants steadily decreased until 2012, whereas the number of gastroenteritis cases caused by the new variants increased between 2010 and 2012. The amino acid sequence in the ORF2 region obtained in this study was compared with other GII.4 variants isolated in various countries. Amino acid variations were observed primarily at epitope sites and the surrounding regions. Amino acids 294, 359, 393, and 413 of the P2 subdomain were the most variable sites among the GII.4 variants. The information in this study can be useful in basic research to predict the emergence and determine the genetic functions of new GII.4 variants.
The ascomycete fungus Fusarium graminearum is a major causal agent for Fusarium head blight in cereals and produces mycotoxins such as trichothecenes and zearalenone. Isolation of the fungal strains ...from air or cereals can be hampered by various other airborne fungal pathogens and saprophytic fungi. In this study, we developed a selective medium specific to F. graminearum using toxoflavin produced by the bacterial pathogen Burkholderia glumae. F. graminearum was resistant to toxoflavin, while other fungi were sensitive to this toxin. Supplementing toxoflavin into medium enhanced the isolation of F. graminearum from rice grains by suppressing the growth of saprophytic fungal species. In addition, a medium with or without toxoflavin exposed to wheat fields for 1 h had 84% or 25%, respectively, of colonies identified as F. graminearum. This selection medium provides an efficient tool for isolating F. graminearum, and can be adopted by research groups working on genetics and disease forecasting.
Fusarium head blight (FHB), caused by 'Fusarium graminearum', infects wheat and barley and diminishes both grain yield and quality. 'Triticum' spp. ecotypes differ in their susceptibility to this ...disease. Using a proteomics approach, we isolated and identified the proteins associated with FHB resistance in a popular Korean wheat genotype with moderate resistance. At 5 days post-anthesis, the floral spikes were point-inoculated with a macroconidial suspension of F. 'graminearum'. After 48 h, we detected 31 of 100 acidic protein spots, and determined that these differentially expressed protein (DEP) spots were the result of FHB exposure. In all, 17 DEPs were up-regulated, 5 were down-regulated, and 2 were unevenly changed. Following tryptic digestion, we used MALDITOF/ TOF mass spectrometry to identify 14 unique proteins in those 24 DEPs, including those related to carbon metabolism and photosynthesis. After inoculation, Rubisco small and large subunits, isoflavone reductase, a chloride carrier/channel, and (1,3;1,4) beta- glucanase were markedly up-regulated, whereas wall-associated kinase 4 was down-regulated. In addition, a (1,3;1,4) beta-glucanase protein (PR-2) was up-regulated in FHB-infected spikes, a finding that is in agreement with previous proteomics and transcriptomics analyses of other crops. Interestingly, most of these proteins were unevenly regulated over the course of infection, although their levels of protein expression were not lower than those untreated samples.
Bi-based catalysts have attracted great attention for efficient electrocatalytic carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction to formic acid (HCOOH). However, the effect of the growth kinetics of Bi nanostructures ...on morphology and their catalytic performance has not been studied. Here, we varied the Bi3+ precursor concentration in the electrolyte to control the electrochemical growth rate of Bi nanostructures. It was found that the growth rate determines not only the geometric structure but also the microstructure of Bi nanostructures. The slow growth with a low precursor concentration (1 mM) produced Bi nano-sheet (NS) with high crystallinity in (012) preferred orientation. But, the polycrystalline Bi nano-branch (NB) with a larger surface area was formed by a faster growth condition (precursor concentration = 30 mM). As a result, Bi NB achieved a higher FEHCOOH of 97.1% than Bi NS (FEHCOOH = 81.5%) at −1.0 VRHE. This work reveals that the growth condition of the Bi nanostructures plays a significant role in designing the catalysts for the efficient CO2 reduction reaction.
A novel porous scaffold designed for application as a bone substitute, with a structure containing three-dimensional (3D) pore channels in a hydroxyapatite (HA) scaffold, was fabricated using a ...combination of a solid freeform fabrication (SFF) and cast in a mold using freezing casting method. This study was performed to evaluate the physical and biomechanical properties of the HA scaffolds fabricated by SFF and using polymer replication method (PRM), one of the conventional methods. Although the phase composition and porosity of these two scaffolds are similar, their external shape and mechanical property were different. All of the fabricated scaffolds showed similar patterns through X-ray diffraction. The difference between porosities of two HA scaffolds were not statistically significant (P>0.05). However, the average compressive strength of the scaffold fabricated by SFF was 14.6 MPa, and that of the scaffold fabricated using polymer replication was 3.56MPa (P<0.05). It was confirmed that SFF fabrication could have a relatively higher mechanical property than PRM fabrication at the same porosity.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a technology that converts spoken words into text, facilitating interaction between humans and machines. One of the most common applications of ASR is ...Speech-To-Text (STT) technology, which simplifies user workflows by transcribing spoken words into text. In the medical field, STT has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of clinicians who rely on typists to transcribe their voice recordings. However, developing an STT model for the medical domain is challenging due to the lack of sufficient speech and text datasets. To address this issue, we propose a medical-domain text correction method that modifies the output text of a general STT system using the Vision Language Pre-training (VLP) method. VLP combines textual and visual information to correct text based on image knowledge. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method offers quantitatively and clinically significant improvements in STT performance in the medical field. We further show that multi-modal understanding of image and text information outperforms single-modal understanding using only text information.
Although gastric hyperplastic polyps are usually considered as benign lesions, a low risk of carcinomatous conversion is currently recognized. We aimed to identify the characteristics of hyperplastic ...polyps undergoing neoplastic transformation.
A total of 269 gastric hyperplastic polyps from 216 patients removed by endoscopic polypectomy (EP) or surgical resection were enrolled in this study, and their endoscopic pictures and pathology slides were reviewed.
Neoplastic transformation was detected on forceps biopsy specimen in 11 cases. However, the pathology findings from the EP or surgical specimen revealed neoplastic transformation in 14 cases (5.2%; 4 with dysplasia and 10 with adenocarcinoma). No significant difference was found between hyperplastic polyps with and without neoplastic transformation in age, sex, location, number of polyps or gross appearance. However, neoplastic transformations were more frequently found in gastric hyperplastic polyps >1 cm than in polyps </=1 cm (12 of 143; 8.4% vs. 2 of 126; 1.6%) (p=0.013).
Neoplastic transformations were more frequently found in gastric hyperplastic polyps >1 cm. Therefore, EP should be considered for gastric hyperplastic polyps >1 cm for the accurate diagnosis and definitive treatment.
Purpose
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging with a long scan time can lead to degraded images due to patient motion, patient discomfort, and increased costs. For these reasons, the role of rapid MR ...imaging is important. In this study, we propose the joint reconstruction of multicontrast brain MR images from down‐sampled data to accelerate the data acquisition process using a novel deep‐learning network.
Methods
Twenty‐one healthy volunteers (female/male = 7/14, age = 26 ± 4 yr, range 22–35 yr) and 16 postoperative patients (female/male = 7/9, age = 49 ± 9 yr, range 37–62 yr) were scanned on a 3T whole‐body scanner for prospective and retrospective studies, respectively, using both T1‐weighted spin‐echo (SE) and T2‐weighted fast spin‐echo (FSE) sequences. We proposed a network which we term “X‐net” to reconstruct both T1‐ and T2‐weighted images from down‐sampled images as well as a network termed “Y‐net” which reconstructs T2‐weighted images from highly down‐sampled T2‐weighted images and fully sampled T1‐weighted images. Both X‐net and Y‐net are composed of two concatenated subnetworks. We investigate optimal sampling patterns, the optimal patch size for augmentation, and the optimal acceleration factors for network training. An additional Y‐net combined with a generative adversarial network (GAN) was also implemented and tested to investigate the effects of the GAN on the Y‐net performance. Single‐ and joint‐reconstruction parallel‐imaging and compressed‐sensing algorithms along with a conventional U‐net were also tested and compared with the proposed networks. For this comparison, the structural similarity (SSIM), normalized mean square error (NMSE), and Fréchet inception distance (FID) were calculated between the outputs of the networks and fully sampled images. The statistical significance of the performance was evaluated by assessing the interclass correlation and in paired t‐tests.
Results
The outputs from the two concatenated subnetworks were closer to the fully sampled images compared to those from one subnetwork, with this result showing statistical significance. Uniform down‐sampling led to a statically significant improvement in the image quality compared to random or central down‐sampling patterns. In addition, the proposed networks provided higher SSIM and NMSE values than U‐net, compressed‐sensing, and parallel‐imaging algorithms, all at statistically significant levels. The GAN‐based Y‐net showed a better FID and more realistic images compared to a non‐GAN‐based Y‐net. The performance capabilities of the networks were similar between normal subjects and patients.
Conclusions
The proposed X‐net and Y‐net effectively reconstructed full images from down‐sampled images, outperforming the conventional parallel‐imaging, compressed‐sensing and U‐net methods and providing more realistic images in combination with a GAN. The developed networks potentially enable us to accelerate multicontrast anatomical MR imaging in routine clinical studies including T1‐and T2‐weighted imaging.
PDF
