AIxSuture: vision-based assessment of open suturing skills.

Purpose: Efficient and precise surgical skills are essential in ensuring positive patient outcomes. By continuously providing real-time, data driven, and objective evaluation of surgical performance, automated skill assessment has the potential to greatly improve surgical skill training. Whereas machine learning-based surgical skill assessment is gaining traction for minimally invasive techniques, this cannot be said for open surgery skills.

On the pitfalls of Batch Normalization for end-to-end video learning: A study on surgical workflow analysis.

Batch Normalization's (BN) unique property of depending on other samples in a batch is known to cause problems in several tasks, including sequence modeling. Yet, BN-related issues are hardly studied for long video understanding, despite the ubiquitous use of BN in CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) for feature extraction. Especially in surgical workflow analysis, where the lack of pretrained feature extractors has led to complex, multi-stage training pipelines, limited awareness of BN issues may have hidden the benefits of training CNNs and temporal models end to end.

Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery With Multimodal Attention.

Automatically recognising surgical gestures from surgical data is an important building block of automated activity recognition and analytics, technical skill assessment, intra-operative assistance and eventually robotic automation. The complexity of articulated instrument trajectories and the inherent variability due to surgical style and patient anatomy make analysis and fine-grained segmentation of surgical motion patterns from robot kinematics alone very difficult. Surgical video provides crucial information from the surgical site with context for the kinematic data and the interaction between the instruments and tissue.

Does caffeine consumption affect laparoscopic skills in a motion tracking analysis? A prospective, randomized, blinded crossover trial.

Background: Coffee can increase vigilance and performance, especially during sleep deprivation. The hypothetical downside of caffeine in the surgical field is the potential interaction with the ergonomics of movement and the central nervous system. The objective of this trial was to investigate the influence of caffeine on laparoscopic performance.

Associations Between Binocular Depth Perception and Performance Gains in Laparoscopic Skill Acquisition.

The ability to perceive differences in depth is important in many daily life situations. It is also of relevance in laparoscopic surgical procedures that require the extrapolation of three-dimensional visual information from two-dimensional planar images. Besides visual-motor coordination, laparoscopic skills and binocular depth perception are demanding visual tasks for which learning is important.

Video-based surgical skill assessment using 3D convolutional neural networks.

Purpose: A profound education of novice surgeons is crucial to ensure that surgical interventions are effective and safe. One important aspect is the teaching of technical skills for minimally invasive or robot-assisted procedures. This includes the objective and preferably automatic assessment of surgical skill.

Would it be safe to have a dog in the MRI scanner before your own examination? A multicenter study to establish hygiene facts related to dogs and men.

Objectives: To determine whether it would be hygienic to evaluate dogs and humans in the same MRI scanner.

Methods: We compared the bacterial load in colony-forming units (CFU) of human-pathogenic microorganisms in specimens taken from 18 men and 30 dogs. In addition, we compared the extent of bacterial contamination of an MRI scanner shared by dogs and humans with two other MRI scanners used exclusively by humans.

Prospective cohort study using the breast cancer spheroid model as a predictor for response to neoadjuvant therapy--the SpheroNEO study.

Background: Aim of this prospective study was to predict response to neoadjuvant therapy in breast cancer patients using an in vitro breast cancer spheroid model.

Methods: Three-dimensional spheroids were directly generated from fresh breast tumor biopsies of 78 patients eligible for neoadjuvant therapy. Cell survival was measured after in vitro exposure to the equivalent therapeutic agents in the breast cancer spheroid model.

Lysis of cancer cells by autologous T cells in breast cancer pleural effusates treated with anti-EpCAM BiTE antibody MT110.

In the present study, the efficacy of a new drug, i.e. the bispecific single-chain antibody MT110 targeting the epithelial antigen EpCAM and the T-cell antigen CD3 was tested ex vivo in malignant pleural effusions (MPEs).

[Inhibitors of alpha-amylase from plants--a possibility to treat diabetes mellitus type II by phytotherapy?].

Antidiabetics of plant origin are in common use. A proof of their effectiveness or their mode of action is often missing. The aim of this work was to review the knowledge about inhibitors of alpha-amylase from plants and to comment on the use in anti-diabetic treatment.

Effect of different phenolic compounds on alpha-amylase activity: screening by microplate-reader based kinetic assay.

The inhibitory effect of different polyphenolic plant compounds on alpha-amylase activity was investigated in vitro. A kinetic assay was performed using 96-well-plates. Acarbose was used as positive control (IC50: 23.

[Expression of Lewis blood group antigens in stomach carcinoma induces metastatic potential].

In a series of gastric cancer patients twenty-eight percent of the primary tumors expressed high levels of the Lewis carbohydrate. This correlated significantly with clinicopathological parameters of advanced disease (tumor size of > 50 mm, M1 stage, UICC stage IIIB/IV). In multivariate analysis, high Lewis expression was found to be a new independent factor of poor prognosis.

Estrogen receptor expression profile of disseminated epithelial tumor cells in bone marrow of breast cancer patients.

The estrogen receptor (ER) status in primary breast cancer represents an important prognostic factor and has a profound impact on therapeutic decisions. However, ER expression profile on disseminated breast cancer cells is largely unknown, although these cells are one of the main target structures in adjuvant therapy after local curative resection (R0) achieved in most breast cancer patients. Thus, the present pilot study was designed to evaluate the ER expression profile on disseminated epithelial cells in bone marrow, one of the preferential organs for manifestation of distant metastases in breast cancer.

[Detection of disseminated tumor cells in bone marrow--currently of no practical therapeutic value].

Development of metastases in cancer patients is usually due to tumour cells seeding from the primary. These disseminated cells can be detected in blood or bone marrow with the aid of immunocytochemical methods. The clinical significance of this is, however, still controversial.

MHC class I negative phenotype of disseminated tumor cells in bone marrow is associated with poor survival in R0M0 breast cancer patients.

Changing the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I phenotype is a pivotal strategy of tumor cells to circumvent an effective immune response and is associated with tumor progression in cancer patients. Epithelial cells in bone marrow have been detected in various tumor types, but the clinical observation that only a portion of the patients with a positive bone marrow status develops solid bone metastasis suggests a certain molecular equipment of the isolated tumor cells as a prerequisite for metastatic formation. In the present study the prognostic impact of the MHC class I phenotype of disseminated epithelial cells in bone marrow was evaluated in a cohort of 30 curatively resected (R0) patients without distant metastases (M0) (designated R0M0) who had minimal residual disease.

A cell-kinetic model of CD34+ cell mobilization and harvest: development of a predictive algorithm for CD34+ cell yield in PBPC collections.

Background: Mobilization and homing of PBPCs are still poorly understood. Thus, a sufficient algorithm for the prediction of PBPC yield in apheresis procedures does not yet exist.

Study Design And Methods: The decline of CD34+ cells in the peripheral blood during apheresis and their simultaneous increase in the collection bag were determined in a prospective study of 18 consecutive apheresis procedures.

Palliative cytoreduction in refractory acute leukemia: a retrospective study of 57 adult patients.

The efficiency and toxicity of treatment regimens for nonintensive cytoreduction in 57 outpatients with refractory acute leukemia (mean age 56 years, 51 AML, six ALL/AUL) were retrospectively studied. Seventeen patients received one treatment regimen, 19 patients two treatment regimens, and 21 patients three or more treatment regimens. The treatment regimens analyzed were 6-thioguanine p.

De novo expression of the cell adhesion molecule E-selectin on gastric cancer endothelium.

Background And Aims: Angiogenesis and the molecular phenotype of the tumor vasculature determine tumor growth and metastasis.

Patients/methods: In a series of 58 gastric cancer patients, vascular density and the antigenic profile of endothelial cells in normal, inflamed and malignant gastric tissues were compared using immunohistochemistry.

Results: In both benign gastric mucosa and primary gastric cancer vascular density was inflammation-independent.

Monoclonal antibody therapy for resected Dukes' C colorectal cancer: seven-year outcome of a multicenter randomized trial.

Purpose: As previously shown, antibody treatment increased survival of patients with resected colorectal cancer of stage Dukes' C. Since the 5-year analysis was criticized because of the wide range (2.7 to 7.

Meta-analyses of studies on bone marrow micrometastases: an independent prognostic impact remains to be substantiated.

Purpose: In 1997, the immunocytologic detection of isolated tumor cells in bone marrow, termed micrometastasis, will be optionally included in the tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) classification indicated M1(i). In the present meta-analyses, 20 studies, which included 2,494 patients, regarding the prognostic influence of a positive bone marrow micrometastases (BMM) status on relapse-free and/or overall survival were analyzed.

Materials And Methods: The literature search included the Medline and Current Contents bibliographic data bases from August 1980 to June 1997.

The Rhesus D-negative phenotype is an independent predictor of poor prognosis in curatively (RO) resected gastric cancer patients.

Among gastric cancer patients, the Rhesus D-negative phenotype correlated with increased tumour recurrence [all patients, n = 83, P = 0.026; curatively (R0) resected patients, n = 51, P = 0.093] and reduced overall survival time (all patients, log-rank P = 0.

High expression of a Lewis(x)-related epitope in gastric carcinomas indicates metastatic potential and poor prognosis.

Background & Aims: The acquisition of metastatic potential is accompanied by phenotypic changes. The aim of this study was to identify those changes that may lead to the development of new antimetastatic strategies in gastric cancer.

Methods: A new murine monoclonal antibody showing differential reactivity with benign and malignant gastric tissues was isolated.

Prognostic significance of bone marrow micrometastases in patients with gastric cancer.

Background: Monoclonal antibodies (mabs) against components of the cytoskeleton such as cytokeratins allow single disseminated epithelial carcinoma cells to be detected in the bone marrow. The aim of this study was to examine the prognostic relevance of these cells in patients with gastric cancer and to evaluate by multivariate analysis their predictive value compared with conventional risk factors.

Patients And Methods: A total of 1 x 10(6) cells from bone marrow aspirates were screened immunoctochemically for the presence and absolute number of disseminated tumor cells using mab CK2 to cytokeratin component no.