Every year cervical cancer affects more than 300,000 people, and on average one woman is diagnosed with cervical cancer every minute. Early diagnosis and classification of cervical lesions greatly ...boosts up the chance of successful treatments of patients, and automated diagnosis and classification of cervical lesions from Papanicolaou (Pap) smear images have become highly demanded. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first study of fully automated cervical lesions analysis on whole slide images (WSIs) of conventional Pap smear samples. The presented deep learning-based cervical lesions diagnosis system is demonstrated to be able to detect high grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSILs) or higher (squamous cell carcinoma; SQCC), which usually immediately indicate patients must be referred to colposcopy, but also to rapidly process WSIs in seconds for practical clinical usage. We evaluate this framework at scale on a dataset of 143 whole slide images, and the proposed method achieves a high precision 0.93, recall 0.90, F-measure 0.88, and Jaccard index 0.84, showing that the proposed system is capable of segmenting HSILs or higher (SQCC) with high precision and reaches sensitivity comparable to the referenced standard produced by pathologists. Based on Fisher's Least Significant Difference (LSD) test (P < 0.0001), the proposed method performs significantly better than the two state-of-the-art benchmark methods (U-Net and SegNet) in precision, F-Measure, Jaccard index. For the run time analysis, the proposed method takes only 210 seconds to process a WSI and is 20 times faster than U-Net and 19 times faster than SegNet, respectively. In summary, the proposed method is demonstrated to be able to both detect HSILs or higher (SQCC), which indicate patients for further treatments, including colposcopy and surgery to remove the lesion, and rapidly processing WSIs in seconds for practical clinical usages.
Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer death among women. Regardless of the development made in the past two decades in the surgery and chemotherapy of ovarian cancer, most of the ...advanced-stage patients are with recurrent cancer and die. The conventional treatment for ovarian cancer is to remove cancerous tissues using surgery followed by chemotherapy, however, patients with such treatment remain at great risk for tumor recurrence and progressive resistance. Nowadays, new treatment with molecular-targeted agents have become accessible. Bevacizumab as a monotherapy in combination with chemotherapy has been recently approved by FDA for the treatment of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). Prediction of therapeutic effects and individualization of therapeutic strategies are critical, but to the authors' best knowledge, there are no effective biomarkers that can be used to predict patient response to bevacizumab treatment for EOC and peritoneal serous papillary carcinoma (PSPC). This dataset helps researchers to explore and develop methods to predict the therapeutic effect of patients with EOC and PSPC to bevacizumab.
This study aimed to determine work-rest schedules for visual tasks of different lengths by evaluating visual fatigue and visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) using an optical head-mounted display ...(OHMD). Thirty participants were recruited to perform 15 and 30 min visual tasks using an OHMD. After completing each visual task, participants executed six levels of rest time. Critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) values, relative electroencephalography indices, and Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) scores were collected and analyzed. Results indicated that after completing the 15 and 30 min visual tasks, participants experienced visual fatigue and VIMS. There was no significant difference between baseline CFF values, four electroencephalography relative power index values, and SSQ scores when participants completed a 15 min visual task followed by a 20 min rest and a 30 min visual task followed by a 30 min rest. Based on our results, a 20 min rest for visual fatigue and VIMS recovery after a 15 min visual task on an OHMD and a 25 min rest for visual fatigue and VIMS recovery after a 30 min visual task on an OHMD are recommended. This study suggests a work-rest schedule for OHMDs that can be used as a reference for OHMD user guidelines to reduce visual fatigue and visually induced motion sickness.
Ovarian cancer is a common malignant gynecological disease. Molecular target therapy, i.e., antiangiogenesis with bevacizumab, was found to be effective in some patients of epithelial ovarian cancer ...(EOC). Although careful patient selection is essential, there are currently no biomarkers available for routine therapeutic usage. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first automated precision oncology framework to effectively identify and select EOC and peritoneal serous papillary carcinoma (PSPC) patients with positive therapeutic effect. From March 2013 to January 2021, we have a database, containing four kinds of immunohistochemical tissue samples, including AIM2, c3, C5 and NLRP3, from patients diagnosed with EOC and PSPC and treated with bevacizumab in a hospital-based retrospective study. We developed a hybrid deep learning framework and weakly supervised deep learning models for each potential biomarker, and the experimental results show that the proposed model in combination with AIM2 achieves high accuracy 0.92, recall 0.97, F-measure 0.93 and AUC 0.97 for the first experiment (66% training and 34%testing) and high accuracy 0.86 ± 0.07, precision 0.9 ± 0.07, recall 0.85 ± 0.06, F-measure 0.87 ± 0.06 and AUC 0.91 ± 0.05 for the second experiment using five-fold cross validation, respectively. Both Kaplan-Meier PFS analysis and Cox proportional hazards model analysis further confirmed that the proposed AIM2-DL model is able to distinguish patients gaining positive therapeutic effects with low cancer recurrence from patients with disease progression after treatment (p < 0.005).
A four-junction InGaN-based multijunction solar cell structure is proposed theoretically. The simulation results show that, with the use of appropriately designed compositional grading layers, the ...performance of InGaN-based multijunction solar cell can be maintained without the cost in performance degradation caused by the polarization-induced electric field and the potential barriers resulting from the heterointerfaces. After the optimization in thicknesses for current matching, a high conversion efficiency of 46.45% can be achieved under 1000-sun AM1.5D illumination, in which the short-circuit current density, open-circuit voltage, and fill factor are 12.2×10 3 mA/cm 2 , 4.18 V, and 0.77, respectively. The simulation results suggest that, in addition to the detrimental effects caused by the built-in electric polarization and potential barriers, the issue of crystalline quality is another critical factor influencing the performance of multijunction solar cells.
Serum thyroglobulin (Tg) is not a reliable tumor marker for monitoring disease status after treatment in patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) with positive anti-thyroglobulin antibody ...(TgAb). The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical role of circulating epithelial cells (CECs) in PTC patients with positive serum TgAb and undetectable serum Tg.
A pilot study was performed to evaluate CECs in 25 PTC patients with positive serum TgAb and undetectable serum Tg. CECs were isolated and enriched from peripheral blood with a negative selection system PowerMag. Immunofluorescence staining with anti-epithelial cell adhesion molecule (anti-EpCAM) and anti-thyroid stimulating hormone receptor (anti-TSHR) antibodies were used to define EpCAM+-CECs and TSHR+-CECs. After CECs testing, 25 patients were classified into two groups: recurrence group (n=7) and remission group (n=18) based on biopsy or imaging studies. The diagnostic accuracy and cutoff points of EpCAM+-CECs and TSHR+-CECs were evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The optimal cut-off values of CECs were determined by the Youden index (sensitivity+specificity−1).
The median numbers of EpCAM+-CECs (72.5 vs. 10.75) and TSHR+-CECs (54 vs. 5.25) were significantly increased in recurrence group compared to remission group. The area under the curve (AUC) showed good performance of EpCAM+-CECs (0.937) and TSHR+-CECs (0.825) to discriminate between recurrence and remission. The cut-off value for EpCAM+-CECs and TSHR+-CECs were set at 48cells/ml and 10cells/ml, respectively and showed a sensitivity (EpCAM+-CECs: 85.7%; TSHR+-CECs: 85.7%) and a specificity (EpCAM+-CECs: 100%; TSHR+-CECs: 77.8%) in predicting the recurrence.
Our study suggests CECs testing could be a potential biomarker to identify recurrence in PTC patients with positive serum TgAb and undetectable serum Tg.
•Serum levels of EpCAM+-CECs and TSHR+-CECs were significantly higher in PTC patients with positive serum TgAb and undetectable serum Tg who will have recurrence.•The count of EpCAM+-CECs may be an independent biomarker to predict recurrence in this special population.•CECs testing could be a potential biomarker to identify recurrence in PTC patients with positive serum TgAb and undetectable serum Tg.
Centerline heat transfer measurements along two opposite ribbed walls in three rotating rectangular ducts roughened by 45° staggered ribs with channel aspect ratios (AR) of 1:1, 2:1 and 4:1 are ...performed at Reynolds (
Re), rotation (
Ro) and buoyancy (
Bu) numbers in the ranges of 5000–30,000, 0–2, and 0.005–8.879, respectively. These channel geometries are in common use as the internal cooling passages of a gas turbine rotor blade and the tested
Ro and
Bu ranges are considerably extended from the previous experiences. This study focuses on the heat transfer characteristics in response to the change of AR under the parameter ranges examined. With zero-rotation (
Ro
=
0), the local Nusselt numbers (
Nu
0) along the centerlines of two opposite ribbed walls increase as AR increases due to the increased rib-height to channel-height ratio. The
Bu impact on heat transfer appears to be AR dependent, i.e. the increase of
Bu elevates Nusselt number ratios
Nu/
Nu
0 in the square channel but impairs heat transfer in the rectangular channels of AR
=
2 and 4. Acting by the Coriolis effect alone, all the leading edge
Nu values in the present
Ro range are lower than the zero-rotation references but started to recover as
Ro increases from 0.1 in the channels of AR
=
1, 2 and from 0.3 in the channel of AR
=
4. The trailing edge
Nu/
Nu
0 ratios increase consistently from unity as
Ro increases but their responses toward the increase of AR are less systematic than those found along the leading edge. The above findings, with the aids of extended
Ro and
Bu ranges achieved by this study, serve as the original contributions for this technical community. The
Nu/
Nu
0 ratios in the rotating channels of AR
=
1, 2, and 4 fall in the ranges of 0.6–2.2, 0.5–2.7, and 0.5–2.1, respectively. A set of heat transfer correlations is derived to represent all the heat transfer data in the periodically developed flow regions of three rotating ducts.
Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) accounts for about 80% of the cases in thyroid cancer. Routine surveillance by serum thyroglobulin (Tg) and medical imaging is the current practice to monitor ...disease progression of the patients. Whether enumeration of circulating epithelial cells (CECs) helps to define disease status of PTC patients was investigated. CECs were enriched from the peripheral blood of the healthy control subjects (G1, n = 17) and the patients at disease-free status (G2, n = 26) or with distant metastasis (G3, n = 22). The number of CECs expressing epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) or thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR) was determined by immunofluorescence microscopy analyses. The medium number of EpCAM+-CECs was 6 (interquartile range 1-11), 12 (interquartile range 7-16) and 91 (interquartile range 31-206) cells/ml of blood for G1, G2 and G3, respectively. EpCAM+-CEC counts were significantly higher in G3 than in G1 (p < 0.05) and G2 (p < 0.05). The medium number of TSHR+-CECs was 9 (interquartile range 3-13), 16 (interquartile range 10-24) and 100 (interquartile range 31-226) cells/ml of blood for G1, G2 and G3, respectively. The TSHR+-CEC counts also distinguished G3 from G1 (p < 0.05) and G2 (p < 0.05). With an appropriate cut off value of CEC count, the disease status for 97.9% (47/48) of the cases was clearly defined. Notably, the metastatic disease for all patients in G3 (22/22) was revealed by combined analysis of serum Tg and CEC. This study implicates that CEC testing can supplement the current standard methods for monitoring disease status of PTC.
Loco-regional recurrence or distant metastasis usually leads to the death of patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Whether or not circulating epithelial cells (CECs) count is a valuable ...marker in monitoring the therapeutic outcome of PTC was investigated. Patients with PTC (n=129) were treated in our medical center and were categorized into 4 groups with excellent (n=45), biochemical incomplete (n=15), indeterminate (n=37), and structural incomplete (n=32) responses. CECs were enriched from the peripheral blood by the PowerMag negative selection system. Three subtypes of CECs expressing epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM), thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR, a marker for thyroid cells), and podoplanin (PDPN, a marker related to poor prognosis in patients with PTC) were defined by immunofluorescence staining, respectively. The median number of CECs (cells/mL of blood) expressing EpCAM, TSHR, and PDPN was 23 (interquartile range 10-61), 19 (interquartile range 8-50), and 8 (interquartile range 3-22), respectively, for patients enrolled in this study. The number of EpCAM
-CECs, TSHR
-CECs, and PDPN
-CECs was statistically different among patients in different treatment response groups without interference from anti-thyroglobulin antibody (P<0.0001). Patients with structural incomplete response had higher counts for all three CECs subtypes when compared to other patients. EpCAM
-CECs was better in distinguishing patients with excellent response from structural incomplete response among the three subtypes of CECs. The sensitivity and specificity of the assay was 84.4% and 95.6%, respectively, when the cut off value was 39 EpCAM
-CECs/mL. CECs testing can supplement the current standard methods for monitoring the therapeutic outcome of PTC.
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