•Staging and grading form cornerstone during cancer management.•Current TNM staging (2017) of oral cancer has included major modifications.•Recent research proposed new grading assessing ...differentiation and dissociation.
Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is a common malignancy of the head and neck region. OSCC has a relatively low survival rate and the incidence of the disease is increasing in some geographic areas. Staging and grading of OSCC are established prerequisites for management, as they influence risk stratification and are the first step toward personalized treatment. The current AJCC/UICC TNM staging (8th edition, 2017) of OSCC has included significant modifications through the incorporation of depth of invasion in the T stage and extracapsular spread/extranodal extension in the N stage. Further modifications for AJCC 8 have been suggested. On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) classification (4th edition, 2017) still endorses a simple, differentiation-based histopathologic grading system of OSCC (despite its low prognostic value) and ignores factors such as tumor growth pattern and dissociation, stromal reactions (desmoplasia, local immune response), and tumor-stroma ratio. The various controversies and possible developments of the current staging and grading criteria of OSCC are briefly discussed in this update together with possible applications of artificial intelligence in the context of screening and risk stratification.
We investigate the importance of the far red wing of the Lya line of hydrogen in the atmospheres of cool white dwarfs of pure hydrogen composition. We find that this absorption process dominates all ...important sources of opacity in the blue part of the optical spectrum of these stars. Our successful fits to the spectra of cool DA/DC white dwarfs indicate that the far red wing of the Lya line is the source of opacity that had been missing in the models. The observed sequence of cool white dwarfs in color-color diagrams is very well reproduced by our new pure hydrogen atmosphere models, suggesting that the atmospheric composition of the coolest DC white dwarfs must be revisited.
Phragmites australis (common reed) has a cosmopolitan distribution and has been suggested as a model organism for the study of invasive plant species. In North America, the non-native subspecies ...(ssp. australis) is widely distributed across the contiguous 48 states in the United States and large parts of Canada. Even though millions of dollars are spent annually on Phragmites management, insufficient knowledge of P. australis impeded the efficiency of management. To solve this problem, transcriptomic information generated from multiple types of tissue could be a valuable resource for future studies. Here, we constructed forty-nine P. australis transcriptomes assemblies via different assembly tools and multiple parameter settings. The optimal transcriptome assembly for functional annotation and downstream analyses was selected among these transcriptome assemblies by comprehensive assessments. For a total of 422,589 transcripts assembled in this transcriptome assembly, 319,046 transcripts (75.5%) have at least one functional annotation. Within the transcriptome assembly, we further identified 1,495 transcripts showing tissue-specific expression pattern, 10,828 putative transcription factors, and 72,165 candidates for simple sequence repeats markers. The identification and analyses of predicted transcripts related to herbicide- and salinity-resistant genes were shown as two applications of the transcriptomic information to facilitate further research on P. australis. Transcriptome assembly and selection would be important for the transcriptome annotation. With this optimal transcriptome assembly and all relative information from downstream analyses, we have helped to establish foundations for future studies on the mechanisms underlying the invasiveness of non-native P. australis subspecies.
Abstract
This paper is a transcript of the 29th Eugene N. Myers, MD International Lecture on Head and Neck Cancer presented at the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) ...in 2020. By the end of the 19th century, the survival rate in treated patients was 10%. With the improvements in surgical techniques, currently, about two thirds of patients survive for > 5 years. Teamwork and progress in surgical reconstruction have led to advancements in ablative surgery; the associated adjuvant treatments have further improved the prognosis in the last 30 years. However, prospective trials are lacking; most of the accumulated knowledge is based on retrospective series and some real-world data analyses. Current knowledge on prognostic factors plays a central role in an efficient treatment decision-making process. Although the influence of most tumor- and patient-related prognostic factors in head and neck cancer cannot be changed by medical interventions, some environmental factors—including treatment, decision-making, and quality—can be modified. Ideally, treatment strategy decisions should be taken in dedicated multidisciplinary team meetings. However, evidence suggests that surgeons and hospital volume and specialization play major roles in patient survival after initial or salvage head and neck cancer treatment. The metrics of surgical quality assurance (surgical margins and nodal yield) in neck dissection have a significant impact on survival in head and neck cancer patients and can be influenced by the surgeon's expertise. Strategies proposed to improve surgical quality include continuous performance measurement, feedback, and dissemination of best practice measures.
Collision-induced absorption (CIA) from molecular hydrogen is a dominant opacity source in the atmosphere of cool white dwarfs. It results in a significant flux depletion in the near-IR and IR parts ...of their spectra. Because of the extreme conditions of helium-rich atmospheres (where the density can be as high as a few g cm−3), this opacity source is expected to undergo strong pressure distortion and the currently used opacities have not been validated at such extreme conditions. To check the distortion of the CIA opacity, we applied state-of-the-art ab initio methods of computational quantum chemistry to simulate the CIA opacity at high densities. The results show that the CIA profiles are significantly distorted above densities of in a way that is not captured by the existing models. The roto-translational band is enhanced and shifted to higher frequencies as an effect of the decrease of the interatomic separation of the H2 molecule. The vibrational band is blueward shifted and split into QR and QP branches, separated by a pronounced interference dip. Its intensity is also substantially reduced. The distortions result in a shift of the maximum of the absorption from 2.3 m to 3-7 m, which could potentially explain the spectra of some very cool, helium-rich white dwarfs.
Lymph node density (LND) has previously been reported to reliably predict recurrence risk and survival in oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). This multicenter international study was designed ...to validate the concept of LND in OSCC.
The study included 4254 patients diagnosed as having OSCC. The median follow-up was 41 months. Five-year overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), disease-free survival (DFS), locoregional control and distant metastasis rates were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Lymph node density (number of positive lymph nodes/total number of excised lymph nodes) was subjected to multivariate analysis.
The OS was 49% for patients with LND0.07 compared with 35% for patients with LND>0.07 (P<0.001). Similarly, the DSS was 60% for patients with LND0.07 compared with 41% for those with LND>0.07 (P<0.001). Lymph node density reliably stratified patients according to their risk of failure within the individual N subgroups (P=0.03). A modified TNM staging system based on LND ratio was consistently superior to the traditional system in estimating survival measures.
This multi-institutional study validates the reliability and applicability of LND as a predictor of outcomes in OSCC. Lymph node density can potentially assist in identifying patients with poor outcomes and therefore for whom more aggressive adjuvant treatment is needed.
We present a new set of cooling models and isochrones for both H- and He-atmosphere white dwarfs (WDs), incorporating accurate boundary conditions from detailed model atmosphere calculations, and ...carbon-oxygen chemical abundance profiles based on updated stellar evolution calculations from the BaSTI stellar evolution archive-a theoretical data center for the Virtual Observatory. We discuss and quantify the uncertainties in the cooling times predicted by the models, arising from the treatment of mixing during the central H- and He-burning phases, the number of thermal pulses experienced by the progenitors, progenitor metallicity, and the {sup 12}C({alpha}, {gamma}){sup 16}O reaction rate. The largest sources of uncertainty turn out to be related to the treatment of convection during the last stages of the progenitor central He-burning phase and the {sup 12}C({alpha}, {gamma}){sup 16}O reaction rate. We compare our new models to previous calculations performed with the same stellar evolution code, and discuss their application to the estimate of the age of the solar neighborhood and the interpretation of the observed number ratios between H- and He-atmosphere WDs. The new WD sequences and an extensive set of WD isochrones that cover a large range of ages and progenitor metallicities are made publicly available at the official BaSTI Web site.
The World Health Organization (WHO) grading system has a low prognostic value for early-stage oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma; greater prognostic power has been shown with tumor budding analysis. ...In this study, we combined tumor budding analysis with histopathologic grading according to WHO 2017. In our proposal, a revised grade I tumor is defined as a "well differentiated cohesive tumor"; revised grade II as a "moderately differentiated and/or slightly dissociated tumor"; and revised grade III as a "poorly differentiated and/or dissociated tumor." We evaluated the prognostic value of this proposed grading system in a multicenter cohort of 311 cases of early oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma. The proposed grading system showed significant prognostic value in multivariable analysis for disease-specific survival with a hazard ratio of 3.86 and a 95% confidence interval of 1.36-10.9 (P=0.001). For disease-free survival, the proposed grading system showed good predictive power in multivariable analysis (hazard ratio, 2.07; 95% confidence interval, 1.00-4.27; P=0.009). The conventional WHO grading system showed a low prognostic value for disease-specific survival and disease-free survival (P>0.05). In conclusion, the prognostic power of the WHO histopathologic grading improved significantly with incorporation of tumor budding. Our proposed grading system can be easily included in pathology reports.
A capillary electrophoresis (CE) method with UV detection was developed for simultaneous identification and quantitation of three tetracyclines: tetracycline (TC), oxytetracycline (OTC) and ...doxycycline (DC) in fish muscle samples. It was developed by analyzing a series of fish tissue samples containing TCs in different concentrations. The CE method was validated in terms of linearity, sensitivity, selectivity, decision limit (CC
α), detection capability (CC
β), precision and accuracy for investigated TCs. The limits of detection (LODs) estimated in the range 1.3–1.8
ng/g, while the limits of quantification (LOQs) for all analyzed TCs were ranged from 4.3 to 5.9
ng/g. The overall recoveries for TC, OTC and DC were 84.0, 80.6 and 89.2%, respectively, with repeatabilities below 6.2% R.S.D. In this report the use of extended light path (ELP) silica capillary and aqueous buffer solutions are combined with low wavelength UV detection (ca. 200
nm) to obtain the necessary sensitivity for simultaneous TCs determination in biological samples.
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