In this study, we engineered liposomal indocyanine green (ICG) to maximize its photothermal effects while maintaining the fluorescence intensity. Various liposomal formulations of ICG were prepared ...by varying the lipid composition and the molar ratio between total lipid and ICG, and their photothermal characteristics were evaluated under near-infrared irradiation. We showed that the ICG dispersity in the liposomal membrane and its physical interaction with phospholipids were the main factors determining the photothermal conversion efficiency. In phototherapeutic studies, the optimized formulation of liposomal ICG showed greater anticancer effects in a mouse tumor model compared with other liposomal formulations and the free form of ICG. Furthermore, we utilized liposomal ICG to visualize the metastatic lymph node around the primary tumor under fluorescence imaging guidance and ablate the lymph node with the enhanced photothermal effect, indicating the potential for selective treatment of metastatic lymph node.
Background
With improved short-term surgical outcomes, laparoscopic distal gastrectomy has rapidly gained popularity. However, the safety and feasibility of laparoscopic total gastrectomy (LTG) has ...not yet been proven due to the difficulty of the technique. This single-arm prospective multi-center study was conducted to evaluate the use of LTG for clinical stage I gastric cancer.
Methods
Between October 2012 and January 2014, 170 patients with pathologically proven, clinical stage I gastric adenocarcinoma located at the proximal stomach were enrolled. Twenty-two experienced surgeons from 19 institutions participated in this clinical trial. The primary end point was the incidence of postoperative morbidity and mortality at postoperative 30 days. The severity of postoperative complications was categorized according to Clavien–Dindo classification, and the incidence of postoperative morbidity and mortality was compared with that in a historical control.
Results
Of the enrolled patients, 160 met criteria for inclusion in the full analysis set. Postoperative morbidity and mortality rates reached 20.6% (33/160) and 0.6% (1/160), respectively. Fifteen patients (9.4%) had grade III or higher complications, and three reoperations (1.9%) were performed. The incidence of morbidity after LTG in this trial did not significantly differ from that reported in a previous study for open total gastrectomy (18%).
Conclusions
LTG performed by experienced surgeons showed acceptable postoperative morbidity and mortality for patients with clinical stage I gastric cancer.
Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) have been known for their strong prognostic and predictive significance in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Several mechanisms for TIL influx in TNBC have ...been elucidated. Major histocompatibility complex class II (MHC-II) is an essential component of the adaptive immune system and is generally restricted to the surface of antigen-presenting cells. However, it has been reported that interferon-gamma signaling may induce MHC-II in almost all cell types, including those derived from cancer. We aimed to examine the relationship between MHC-II expression in tumor cells and the amount of TILs in 681 patients with TNBC. Further, the prognostic significance of MHC-II and the association of MHC-II with a couple of molecules involved in the interferon signaling pathway were investigated using immunohistochemical staining. Higher MHC-II expression in tumor cells was associated with the absence of lymphovascular invasion (p = 0.042); larger amounts of TILs (p < 0.001); frequent formations of tertiary lymphoid structures (p < 0.001); higher expression of myxovirus resistance gene A, one of the main mediators of the interferon signaling pathway (p < 0.001); and higher expression of double-stranded RNA-activated protein kinase, which can be induced by interferons (p = 0.008). Moreover, tumors that showed high MHC class I expression and any positivity for MHC-II had larger amounts of CD4- and CD8-positive T lymphocytes (p < 0.001). Positive MHC-II expression in tumor cells was associated with better disease-free survival in patients who had lymph node metastasis (p = 0.009). In conclusion, MHC-II expression in tumor cells was closely associated with an increase in TIL number and interferon signaling in TNBC. Further studies are warranted to improve our understanding regarding TIL influx, as well as patients' responses to immunotherapy.
•Psychometric function based on a normal distribution function.•Psychometric function based on a bivariate normal distribution function.•Psychometric function based on a non-central F-distribution ...function.•Four-interval oddity test is more powerful than the Triangle and Duo-trio tests.•Tables and R codes for data analysis using the four-interval oddity task.
The four-interval oddity task is an extension of the Triangle method, which is the three-interval oddity task and is one of the most broadly used conventional sensory discrimination methods. It is a special case of the m-interval oddity task or the m-alternative odd-man-out task where m = 4. It is also a special situation of the unspecified ‘M + N’ with M = 3 and N = 1. Some new forms of the analytical psychometric function for the four-interval oddity task based on a normal distribution function, a bivariate normal distribution function, and a non-central F-distribution function are provided originally in this paper. The performance of the four-interval oddity task in both difference testing and similarity/equivalence testing is explored and compared with some unspecified forced-choice sensory discrimination methods including the Triangle. Tables and R codes are presented and provided for estimations of the probability of correct response, Pc, Thurstonian discriminal distance δ or d´, and the B value for estimating the variance of d´ for the four-interval oddity task.
•Epidemiologic features of the second and third waves of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in South Korea were compared.•Strengthening of social distancing policies was delayed in the ...third wave compared with the second wave.•The third wave persisted longer than the second wave, and had a higher case fatality rate.•Early public health intervention is important to control the COVID-19 pandemic.
To compare epidemiologic features of the second and third waves of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in South Korea.
Nationwide COVID-19 data were collected between 6 May and 30 December 2020. The degree of social activity was estimated using an Internet search trend analysis program for leisure-related keywords, including ‘eating-out’, ‘trip’ and ‘get directions’ (transportation). Demographics, transmission chains, case fatality rates, social activity levels and public health responses were compared between the second (13 August–18 September 2020) and third (4 November 2020–present) waves.
In comparison with the second wave, the third wave was characterized by delayed strengthening of social distancing policies (3 vs. 15 days), longer duration (36 vs. >56 days) and a higher case fatality rate (0.91% vs. 1.26%). There were significant differences in transmission chains between the second and third waves (P < 0.01). In comparison with the second wave, the proportion of local clusters (24.8% vs. 45.7%) was lower in the third wave, and personal contact transmission (38.5% vs. 25.9%) and unknown routes of transmission (23.5% vs. 20.8%) were higher in the third wave.
Early and timely interventions with strengthened social distancing policies should be implemented to suppress and control the COVID-19 pandemic effectively.
The generalization capability of unsupervised domain adaptation can mitigate the need for extensive pixel-level annotations to train semantic segmentation networks by training models on synthetic ...data as a source with computer-generated annotations. Entropy-based adversarial networks are proposed to improve source domain prediction; however, they disregard significant external information, such as edges, which have the potential to identify and distinguish various objects within an image accurately. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach to domain adaptation, leveraging the synergy of internal and external information within entropy-based adversarial networks. In this approach, we enrich the discriminator network with edge-predicted probability values within this innovative framework to enhance the clarity of class boundaries. Furthermore, we devised a probability-sharing network that integrates diverse information for more effective segmentation. Incorporating object edges addresses a pivotal aspect of unsupervised domain adaptation that has frequently been neglected in the past—the precise delineation of object boundaries. Conventional unsupervised domain adaptation methods usually center around aligning feature distributions and may not explicitly model object boundaries. Our approach effectively bridges this gap by offering clear guidance on object boundaries, thereby elevating the quality of domain adaptation. Our approach undergoes rigorous evaluation on the established unsupervised domain adaptation benchmarks, specifically in adapting SYNTHIA → Cityscapes and SYNTHIA → Mapillary. Experimental results show that the proposed model attains better performance than state-of-the-art methods. The superior performance across different unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios highlights the versatility and robustness of the proposed method.
•Establishing dataset creation via edge extraction from segmentation maps.•Pioneering dual transmission of edge and depth-semantic probabilities.•Surpassing prior techniques in S2R benchmark dataset performance.
•An analytical psychometric function for the dual reference duo-trio (DRDT).•Two forms of the analytical psychometric function for the DRDT.•Tables and R codes for Pc,d', and variance of d' (B value) ...based on the function.
The dual reference duo-trio (DRDT) is an improved balanced-reference duo-trio method, in which two same references are presented in a test but the reference is changed across the tests. The performance of the DRDT has been investigated theoretically based on a simulation-derived psychometric function in a previous paper published in this journal. The DRDT method is more powerful than the conventional duo-trio and the triangle methods. This paper derives an analytical psychometric function for the DRDT. Another form of the psychometric function for the DRDT is also derived based on the Torgerson’s method of triads. Tables and R codes are provided for presentations and calculations of Pc, δ (or d'), and variance of d' (B-value) based on the analytical psychometric function for the method.
•The d′A expectation profile effectively quantified consumer-expected attributes.•The d′A expectation profile pinpointed key attributes for overall satisfaction.•Satisfaction drivers were identified ...from PLSR and LSA using product sensory tests.•The d′A expectation profile provided better optimization insights than PLSR or LSA.•Expected profile valence can be customized for target consumers.
Understanding consumer requirements with respect to the sensory attributes of food and the sentimental consequences is critical for enhancing consumer satisfaction and achieving market success. A recent innovation, the signal detection expectation profiling method, introduced by Lee, Kim, van Hout, and Lee (2021), utilizes the two-step rating-based ‘double-faced applicability (DFA)’ test to create expectation profiles for product attributes, quantified by d′A output measures. This study aimed to demonstrate and test the usage and efficacy of the d′A expectation profiling method to provide insight for product development. The efficiency of this approach for using a two-step rating-based DFA was examined first and the information guided by the d′A expectation profiling output measures was compared to satisfaction drivers identified through partial least square (PLS) regression and landscape segmentation analysis (LSA), commonly used to link consumer satisfaction/liking and sensory perception. Consumer expectations and satisfaction/sensory evaluations of six different mayonnaise products formed the dataset. Overall, the d′A expectation profiles effectively identified the key attributes significantly impacting overall satisfaction, aligning with the results of the PLS regression and LSA. The advantage of d′A expectation profiles lies in their quantitative representation of the degree of expected sensory attributes, extending beyond the scope of actual evaluated products and offering actionable insights for product optimization. Furthermore, by incorporating custom attributes (descriptor pairs) based on the hedonic valence of target consumers, the d′A expectation profile showcases the potential for effectively addressing consumer-relevant attributes tailored to specific target consumer groups.
The fabrication of ultrathin silicon wafers at low cost is crucial for advancing silicon electronics toward stretchability and flexibility. However, conventional fabrication techniques are ...inefficient because they sacrifice a large amount of substrate material. Thus, advanced silicon electronics that have been realized in laboratories cannot move forward to commercialization. Here, a fully bottom‐up technique for producing a self‐releasing ultrathin silicon wafer without sacrificing any of the substrate is presented. The key to this approach is a self‐organized nanogap on the substrate fabricated by plasma‐assisted epitaxial growth (plasma‐epi) and subsequent hydrogen annealing. The wafer thickness can be independently controlled during the bulk growth after the formation of plasma‐epi seed layer. In addition, semiconductor devices are realized using the ultrathin silicon wafer. Given the high scalability of plasma‐epi and its compatibility with conventional semiconductor process, the proposed bottom‐up wafer fabrication process will open a new route to developing advanced silicon electronics.
A fully bottom‐up technique for fabricating a self‐releasing ultrathin silicon wafer without sacrificing any of the substrate is presented, whereas conventional technologies waste large amounts of such material. A plasma‐assisted epitaxially grown silicon seed layer with a self‐organized nanogap is a key for the realization of the fully bottom‐up process. The results represent a technological breakthrough in advanced silicon microelectronics and photovoltaics.
Patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can unknowingly spread the virus to several people during the early subclinical period.
We evaluated the viral dynamics in various body fluid ...specimens, such as nasopharyngeal swab, oropharyngeal swab, saliva, sputum, and urine specimens, of two patients with COVID-19 from hospital day 1 to 9. Additional samples of the saliva were taken at 1 hour, 2 hours, and 4 hours after using a chlorhexidine mouthwash. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) viral load was determined by real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR).
SARS-CoV-2 was detected from all the five specimens of both patients by rRT-PCR. The viral load was the highest in the nasopharynx (patient 1 = 8.41 log
copies/mL; patient 2 = 7.49 log
copies/mL), but it was also remarkably high in the saliva (patient 1 = 6.63 log
copies/mL; patient 2 = 7.10 log
copies/mL). SARS-CoV-2 was detected up to hospital day 6 (illness day 9 for patient 2) from the saliva of both patients. The viral load in the saliva decreased transiently for 2 hours after using the chlorhexidine mouthwash.
SARS-CoV-2 viral load was consistently high in the saliva; it was relatively higher than that in the oropharynx during the early stage of COVID-19. Chlorhexidine mouthwash was effective in reducing the SARS-CoV-2 viral load in the saliva for a short-term period.
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