Background: Radiomics has emerged as a new approach that can help identify imaging information associated with tumor pathophysiology. We developed and validated a radiomics nomogram for preoperative ...prediction of microvascular invasion (MVI) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods: Two hundred and eight patients with pathologically confirmed HCC (training cohort: n = 146; validation cohort: n = 62) who underwent preoperative gadoxetic acid-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) imaging were included. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator logistic regression was applied to select features and construct signatures derived from MR images. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify the significant clinicoradiological variables and radiomics signatures associated with MVI, which were then incorporated into the predictive nomogram. The performance of the radiomics nomogram was evaluated by its calibration, discrimination, and clinical utility. Results: Higher α-fetoprotein level (p = 0.046), nonsmooth tumor margin (p = 0.003), arterial peritumoral enhancement (p < 0.001), and the radiomics signatures of hepatobiliary phase (HBP) T1-weighted images (p < 0.001) and HBP T1 maps (p < 0.001) were independent risk factors of MVI. The predictive model that incorporated the clinicoradiological factors and the radiomic features derived from HBP images outperformed the combination of clinicoradiological factors in the training cohort (area under the curves AUCs 0.943 vs. 0.850; p = 0.002), though the validation did not have a statistical significance (AUCs 0.861 vs. 0.759; p = 0.111). The nomogram based on the model exhibited C-index of 0.936 (95% CI 0.895–0.976) and 0.864 (95% CI 0.761–0.967) in the training and validation cohort, fitting well in calibration curves (p > 0.05). Decision curve analysis further confirmed the clinical usefulness of the nomogram. Conclusions: The nomogram incorporating clinicoradiological risk factors and radiomic features derived from HBP images achieved satisfactory preoperative prediction of the individualized risk of MVI in patients with HCC.
The potential correlation between H2AFY (also known as MacroH2A1) and the clinical characteristics of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients was analysed through gene expression profiles and ...clinical data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and the diagnostic and prognostic value of H2AFY in HCC was discussed.
The gene expression data of HCC and the corresponding clinical characteristics of HCC patients were downloaded from the TCGA database. The differences in H2AFY in normal liver tissues and HCC were analysed. The relationship between H2AFY and clinical characteristics was analysed by Wilcoxon signed-rank test, logistic regression and Kruskal-Wallis test. The Kaplan-Meier method and the Cox regression method were used to analyse the relationship between overall survival and clinical characteristics of the patients. An ROC curve was used to predict the diagnostic value of H2AFY in HCC. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was used to analyse the pathway enrichment of H2AFY.
Compared with normal liver tissues, H2AFY was significantly highly expressed in HCC. H2AFY was positively correlated with the age, clinical stage, G stage (grade) and T stage (tumor stage) of liver cancer patients. Higher H2AFY expression predicted a poor prognosis in HCC patients. Cox regression analysis suggested that H2AFY was an independent risk factor for the prognosis of HCC patients. The ROC curve suggested that H2AFY had certain diagnostic value in HCC. GSEA suggested that H2AFY was correlated with lipid metabolism and a variety of tumour pathways.
Our study showed that H2AFY was significantly overexpressed in HCC. H2AFY may be a potential diagnostic and prognostic marker for HCC, and high expression of H2AFY predicts a poor prognosis in patients with HCC.
Background The incidence of severe infections (SIs) in patients with autoimmune nephropathy after rituximab (RTX) treatment varies significantly. Our study aims to identify high-risk populations, ...specifically by comparing the differences in the risk of SIs between patients with primary nephropathy and those with nephropathy in the context of systemic autoimmune diseases (referred to as secondary nephropathy). Methods This retrospective cohort study investigated the occurrence of SIs in adult patients with immune-related kidney disease who received RTX treatment at our institution from 2017 to 2022. Multivariable COX regression models were used to analyze the association between the type of nephropathy (primary or secondary) and SIs. Propensity score analyses, subgroup analyses, and E-value calculations were performed to ensure the reliability of the results. Results Out of 123 patients, 32 (26%) developed 39 cases of SIs during a mean follow-up period of 19.7 ± 14.6 months post-RTX treatment, resulting in an incidence rate of 18.9/100 patient-years. The multivariable COX regression analysis indicated that patients with secondary nephropathy had a significantly higher risk of SIs compared to those with primary nephropathy (HR = 5.86, 95% CI: 1.05–32.63, P = 0.044), even after accounting for confounding variables including gender, age, BMI, history of prior SIs, baseline eGFR, lymphocyte counts, IgG levels, and the utilization of other immunosuppressive therapies. Various sensitivity analyses consistently supported these findings, with an E-value of 5.99. Furthermore, advanced age (HR: 1.03; 95% CI: 1.01–1.06; P = 0.023), low baseline IgG levels (HR: 0.75; 95% CI: 0.64–0.89; P < 0.001), and recent history of SIs (HR: 5.68; 95% CI: 2.2–14.66; P < 0.001) were identified as independent risk factors. Conclusion The incidence of SIs following RTX administration in patients with autoimmune nephropathy is significant. It is crucial to note that there are distinct differences between the subgroups of primary and secondary nephropathy. Patients with secondary nephropathy, particularly those who are elderly, have low baseline IgG levels, and have a recent history of SI, are more susceptible to SIs.
Organic waste has great potential for use as an amendment to immobilize heavy metals in the environment. Therefore, this study investigates various properties of cow manure (CM) and its derived ...vermicompost (CV), including the pH, cationic exchangeable capacity (CEC), elemental composition and surface structure, to determine the potential of these waste products to remove Pb2+ and Cd2+ from solution. The results demonstrate that CV has a much higher pH, CEC and more irregular pores than CM and is enriched with minerals and ash content but has a lower C, H, O and N content. Adsorption isotherms studies shows that the adsorption of Pb2+ and Cd2+ onto either CM or CV follows a Langmuir model and presents maximum Pb2+ and Cd2+ adsorption capacities of 102.77 mg g−1 and 38.11 mg g−1 onto CM and 170.65 and 43.01 mg g−1 onto CV, respectively. Kinetic studies show that the adsorption of Pb2+ onto CM and CV fits an Elovich model, whereas the adsorption of Cd2+ onto CM and CV fits a pseudo-second-order model. Desorption studies indicate that CV is more effective than CM in removing Pb2+ and Cd2+. FTIR analysis demonstrates that the adsorption of Pb2+ and Cd2+ onto CM mainly depends on existed aliphatic alcohol, aromatic acid as well as new produced carbonates, whereas that onto CV may be contributed by the existed aliphatic alcohol, aromatic acids as well as some carbonates and phosphates. Thus, vermicomposting disposal of cow manure with destination mineral addition may broaden the way of its recycle and environmental usage.
The existed aliphatic alcohol, aromatic acids and its only carbonates and phosphates may underlie much higher efficiency of vermicompost (CV) on Pb2+ and Cd2+ removal than cow manure (CM). Display omitted
•Less irregular pores in cow manure (CM) than its vermicompost (CV).•More Pb2+ or Cd2+ could be removed from solution by vermicompost (CV) than by cow manure (CM).•The existed aliphatic alcohol, aromatic acids, carbonates and phosphates in vermicompost (CV) may contribute to its high efficiency.•Vermicomposting of cow manure (CM) with destination mineral addition may broaden its recycle and environmental usage.
The existed aliphatic alcohol, aromatic acids and its only carbonates and phosphates may underlie much higher efficiency of vermicompost (CV) on Pb2+ and Cd2+ removal than cow manure (CM).
The rapidly increasing amount of public data in chemistry and biology provides new opportunities for large-scale data mining for drug discovery. Systematic integration of these heterogeneous sets and ...provision of algorithms to data mine the integrated sets would permit investigation of complex mechanisms of action of drugs. In this work we integrated and annotated data from public datasets relating to drugs, chemical compounds, protein targets, diseases, side effects and pathways, building a semantic linked network consisting of over 290,000 nodes and 720,000 edges. We developed a statistical model to assess the association of drug target pairs based on their relation with other linked objects. Validation experiments demonstrate the model can correctly identify known direct drug target pairs with high precision. Indirect drug target pairs (for example drugs which change gene expression level) are also identified but not as strongly as direct pairs. We further calculated the association scores for 157 drugs from 10 disease areas against 1683 human targets, and measured their similarity using a Formula: see text score matrix. The similarity network indicates that drugs from the same disease area tend to cluster together in ways that are not captured by structural similarity, with several potential new drug pairings being identified. This work thus provides a novel, validated alternative to existing drug target prediction algorithms. The web service is freely available at: http://chem2bio2rdf.org/slap.
Neuropeptides are ubiquitous intercellular signaling molecules in the CNS and play diverse roles in modulating physiological functions by acting on specific G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Among ...them, the elevenin signaling system is now believed to be present primarily in protostomes. Although elevenin was first identified from the L11 neuron of the abdominal ganglion in mollusc Aplysia californica, no receptors have been described in Aplysia, nor in any other molluscs. Here, using two elevenin receptors in annelid Platynereis dumerilii, we found three putative elevenin GPCRs in Aplysia. We cloned the three receptors and tentatively named them apElevR1, apElevR2, and apElevR3. Using an inositol monophosphate (IP1) accumulation assay, we demonstrated that Aplysia elevenin with the disulfide bond activated the three putative receptors with low EC50 values (ranging from 1.2 to 25 nM), supporting that they are true receptors for elevenin. In contrast, elevenin without the disulfide bond could not activate the receptors, indicating that the disulfide bond is required for receptor activity. Using alanine substitution of individual conserved residues other than the two cysteines, we showed that these residues appear to be critical to receptor activity, and the three different receptors had different sensitivities to the single residue substitution. Finally, we examined the roles of those residues outside the disulfide bond ring by removing these residues and found that they also appeared to be important to receptor activity. Thus, our study provides an important basis for further study of the functions of elevenin and its receptors in Aplysia and other molluscs.
Cross-domain text recognition is a very challenging task due to the domain drift problem. One solution is aligning feature distributions between domains through Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). ...All existing methods perform feature alignment based on the whole image or semantic character features. However, visual character features without contextual semantics also contain much valuable information, e.g ., stroke features of individual characters, which also benefits domain transfer. To this end, we propose a dual intra-Class Aggregation based unsupervised Domain Adaptation method (CADA) for text recognition, which aligns both visual and semantic character feature distributions. To our knowledge, CADA is the first to consider visual character features without contextual semantics in cross-domain text recognition tasks. Accordingly, a Single-head Self-Attention (SSA) mechanism is introduced for extracting visual character features. Thereafter, a dual intra-class aggregation strategy is designed, which performs class aggregations in both visual and semantic spaces. We test the proposed method on widely-used datasets by combining it with representative text recognition models with various decoding methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority and generality. Moreover, there is no additional inference time introduced compared to the baselines.
COVID-19 is a pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Early reported symptoms include fever, cough, and respiratory symptoms. There were few reports of ...digestive symptoms. However, with COVID-19 spreading worldwide, symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain have gained increasing attention. Research has found that angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the SARS-CoV-2 receptor, is strongly expressed in the gastrointestinal tract and liver. Whether theoretically or clinically, many studies have suggested a close connection between COVID-19 and the digestive system. In this review, we summarize the digestive symptoms reported in existing research, discuss the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the gastrointestinal tract and liver, and determine the possible mechanisms and aetiology, such as cytokine storm. In-depth exploration of the relationship between COVID-19 and the digestive system is urgently needed.
Plant bacterial diseases are an intractable problem due to the fact that phytopathogens have acquired strong resistances for traditional pesticides, resulting in restricting the quality and yield of ...agricultural products around the world. To develop new agrochemical alternatives, we prepared a novel series of sulfanilamide derivatives containing piperidine fragments and assessed their antibacterial potency. The bioassay results revealed that most molecules displayed excellent in vitro antibacterial potency towards
pv.
(
) and
pv.
(
). In particular, molecule
exhibited outstanding inhibitory activity toward
with EC
value of 2.02 µg mL
, which was significantly better than those of the commercial agents bismerthiazol (EC
= 42.38 µg mL
) and thiodiazole copper (EC
= 64.50 µg mL
). A series of biochemical assays confirmed that compound
interacted with dihydropteroate synthase, and irreversibly damaged the cell membrane. In vivo assays showed that the molecule
presented acceptable curative and protection activities of 34.78% and 39.83%, respectively, at 200 µg mL
, which were greater than those of thiodiazole and bismerthiazol. This study highlights the valuable insights for the excavation and development of new bactericides that can concurrently target dihydropteroate synthase and bacterial cell membranes.
Abstract
The topological materials have attracted much attention for their unique electronic structure and peculiar physical properties. ZrTe
5
has host a long-standing puzzle on its anomalous ...transport properties manifested by its unusual resistivity peak and the reversal of the charge carrier type. It is also predicted that single-layer ZrTe
5
is a two-dimensional topological insulator and there is possibly a topological phase transition in bulk ZrTe
5
. Here we report high-resolution laser-based angle-resolved photoemission measurements on the electronic structure and its detailed temperature evolution of ZrTe
5
. Our results provide direct electronic evidence on the temperature-induced Lifshitz transition, which gives a natural understanding on underlying origin of the resistivity anomaly in ZrTe
5
. In addition, we observe one-dimensional-like electronic features from the edges of the cracked ZrTe
5
samples. Our observations indicate that ZrTe
5
is a weak topological insulator and it exhibits a tendency to become a strong topological insulator when the layer distance is reduced.
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