Integrating Frailty Assessment to Enhance Care in Cancer Patients with Borderline Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status.

Background: The (ECOG) performance status (PS) is commonly used to evaluate the functional ability of patients undergoing antitumor therapy. An ECOG PS of 2, indicating patients capable of self-care but restricted strenuous activity, can complicate treatment decisions owing to concerns regarding treatment-related toxicity. We investigated whether frailty assessment could help discriminate treatment tolerance and survival outcomes in patients with an ECOG PS of 2.

Frailty assessment by two screening instruments in non-elderly patients with head and neck cancer.

Purpose: Frailty assessment is often overlooked in non-elderly patients with cancer, possibly due to the lack of an effective frailty screening tool. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of two modern frailty screening tools, the Flemish version of the Triage Risk Screening Tool (fTRST) and the modified 5-Item Frailty Index (mFI-5), compared to the gold standard comprehensive geriatric assessment (GA) among non-elderly patients with head and neck cancer (HNC).

Methods: We prospectively included 354 consecutive patients aged < 65 years with newly diagnosed HNC scheduled for definitive concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) at three academic hospitals in Taiwan between January 2020 and December 2022.

Impact of preoperative frailty on the surgical and survival outcomes in older patients with solid cancer after elective abdominal surgery.

Background: Frailty is common in older patients with cancer; however, its clinical impact on the survival outcomes has seldom been examined in these patients. This study aimed to investigate the association of frailty with the survival outcomes and surgical complications in older patients with cancer after elective abdominal surgery in Taiwan.

Methods: We prospectively enrolled 345 consecutive patients aged ≥65 years with newly diagnosed cancer who underwent elective abdominal surgery between 2016 and 2018.

Effect of prophylactic tube feeding in head and neck cancer patients with high Mallampati score undergoing definitive concurrent chemoradiotherapy.

Purpose: There is no consensus on the selection of appropriate prophylactic tube feeding in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) undergoing concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT). This study aimed to evaluate the effect of prophylactic tube feeding in patients with HNSCC who presented with a high Mallampati score and underwent CCRT.

Methods: We prospectively enrolled 185 consecutive patients with stage II to IVa HNSCC and a pre-treatment Mallampati score of 3 or 4 who received CCRT between August 2017 and December 2018 with follow-up data collected retrospectively.

Jointly Defending DeepFake Manipulation and Adversarial Attack Using Decoy Mechanism.

Highly realistic imaging and video synthesis have become possible and relatively simple tasks with the rapid growth of generative adversarial networks (GANs). GAN-related applications, such as DeepFake image and video manipulation and adversarial attacks, have been used to disrupt and confound the truth in images and videos over social media. DeepFake technology aims to synthesize high visual quality image content that can mislead the human vision system, while the adversarial perturbation attempts to mislead the deep neural networks to a wrong prediction.

Hyperspectral Tensor Completion Using Low-Rank Modeling and Convex Functional Analysis.

Hyperspectral tensor completion (HTC) for remote sensing, critical for advancing space exploration and other satellite imaging technologies, has drawn considerable attention from recent machine learning community. Hyperspectral image (HSI) contains a wide range of narrowly spaced spectral bands hence forming unique electrical magnetic signatures for distinct materials, and thus plays an irreplaceable role in remote material identification. Nevertheless, remotely acquired HSIs are of low data purity and quite often incompletely observed or corrupted during transmission.

Multi-head self-attention mechanism enabled individualized hemoglobin prediction and treatment recommendation systems in anemia management for hemodialysis patients.

Anemia is a critical complication in hemodialysis patients, but the response to erythropoietin-stimulating agents (ESA) treatment varies from patient to patient and is not linear across different time points. The aim of this study was to develop deep learning algorithms for individualized anemia management. We retrospectively collected 36,677 data points from 623 hemodialysis patients, including clinical data, laboratory values, hemoglobin levels, and previous ESA doses.

Adjuvant Chemoradiotherapy Associated with Improved Overall Survival in Resected Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma after Neoadjuvant Chemoradiotherapy in Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy Era.

Background: The prognosis of patients with resected esophageal squamous cell carcinoma after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy is particularly poor in those who were staged as ypT3/T4 and/or ypN+. This study investigated whether adjuvant chemoradiotherapy was associated with improved clinical outcomes in these patients.

Methods: we identified patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma who were staged as ypT3/T4 and/or ypN+ after being treated with neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy followed by esophagectomy between the years 2013 and 2019.

Investigation of Parameter Sensitivity and the Physical Mechanism for the Formation of a Core-Skin-Core (CSC) Structure in Two-Stage Co-Injection Molding.

One of the main challenges in co-injection molding is how to predict the skin to core morphology accurately and then manage it properly, especially after skin material has been broken through. In this study, the formation of the Core-Skin-Core (CSC) structure and its physical mechanism in a two-stage co-injection molding has been studied based on the ASTM D638 TYPE V system by using both numerical simulation and experimental observation. Results showed that when the skin to core ratio is selected properly (say 30/70), the CSC structure can be observed clearly at central location for 30SFPP/30SFPP system.

Predictive Value of Albumin and Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio Score for Treatment Completeness and Safety Profiles in Patients With Head and Neck Cancer Receiving Definitive Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy.

Background/aim: Malnutrition and inflammation are common conditions in patients with head and neck cancer (HNC). This study aimed to evaluate the predictive value of albumin combined with neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), referring to the albumin-NLR score (ANS), in the prediction of treatment completeness and safety profiles in HNC patients receiving definitive concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT).

Patients And Methods: 461 consecutive HNC patients who received CCRT between 2016 and 2017 at three medical centers in Taiwan were prospectively enrolled and divided into three different groups based on their pretreatment ANS (ANS 0, high albumin and low NLR; ANS 1, low albumin or high NLR; and ANS 2, low albumin and high NLR) for treatment completeness and safety profiles comparison.

Potential Utility of the Mallampati Score for Prediction of Treatment Compliance and Safety Profiles of Patients With Head and Neck Cancer Undergoing Definitive Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy.

Background/aim: Restriction of mouth opening (RMO) is a common manifestation of head and neck cancer (HNC) and a poor prognostic factor following concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) of patients. This study aimed to explore whether the Mallampati score, a visual assessment of the distance from the tongue base to the roof of the mouth, can be used as a surrogate for RMO in predicting treatment outcomes in patients with HNC undergoing CCRT.

Patients And Methods: A total of 461 consecutive patients who received definitive CCRT for the treatment of locally advanced HNC between August 2016 and December 2017 at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan (Linkou, Keelung, and Kaohsiung branches) were enrolled in this prospective study.

Semantic segmentation guided detector for segmentation, classification, and lesion mapping of acute ischemic stroke in MRI images.

Background And Purpose: MRI images timely and accurately reflect ischemic injuries to the brain tissues and, therefore, can support clinical decision-making of acute ischemic stroke (AIS). To maximize the information provided by the MRI images, we leverage deep learning models to segment, classify, and map lesion distributions of AIS.

Methods: We evaluated brain MRI images of AIS patients from 2017 to 2020 at a tertiary teaching hospital and developed the Semantic Segmentation Guided Detector Network (SGD-Net), composed of the first U-shaped model for segmentation in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and the second model for binary classification of lesion size (lacune vs.

ADAM Challenge: Detecting Age-Related Macular Degeneration From Fundus Images.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment among elderly in the world. Early detection of AMD is of great importance, as the vision loss caused by this disease is irreversible and permanent. Color fundus photography is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders.

Characteristics Associated with the Differential Activity of Nondominant and Dominant Affected Hands in Patients with Poststroke Right Hemiparesis.

Objectives: Spontaneous arm use in patients with poststroke hemiparesis is crucial to the recovery of functional interaction. Patients with stroke and subsequent right hemiparesis have more difficulty adapting to a right-handed environment. The aim of this study was to use wearable devices to assess the asymmetry and difference in the amount of activity of the nondominant and dominant affected hands among patients with stroke and right hemiparesis.

Development and validation of a prognostic nomogram to predict survival in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer receiving second-line palliative chemotherapy.

Background And Aim: Given that a wide variation in tumor response rates and survival times suggests heterogeneity among the patients with advanced pancreatic cancer (APC) who underwent second-line (L2) chemotherapy, it is a challenge in clinical practice to identify patients who will receive the most benefit from L2 treatment.

Methods: We selected 183 APC patients who received L2 palliative chemotherapy between 2010 and 2016 from a medical center as the development cohort. A Cox proportional hazard model was used to identify the prognostic factors and construct the nomogram.

SiGAN: Siamese Generative Adversarial Network for Identity-Preserving Face Hallucination.

Though generative adversarial networks (GANs) can hallucinate high-quality high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) faces, they cannot ensure identity preservation during face hallucination, making the HR faces difficult to recognize. To address this problem, we propose a Siamese GAN (SiGAN) to reconstruct HR faces that visually resemble their corresponding identities. On top of a Siamese network, the proposed SiGAN consists of a pair of two identical generators and one discriminator.

The Effect of Music Listening on Pain, Heart Rate Variability, and Range of Motion in Older Adults After Total Knee Replacement.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects that listening and not listening to music had on pain relief, heart rate variability (HRV), and knee range of motion in total knee replacement (TKR) patients who underwent continuous passive motion (CPM) rehabilitation. We adopted a single-group quasi-experimental design. A sample of 49 TKR patients listened to music for 25 min during one session of CPM and no music during another session of CPM the same day for a total of 2 days.

Effectiveness of Music Listening in Patients With Total Knee Replacement During CPM Rehabilitation.

Aim: This study investigated the effects of music listening on the anxiety, heart rate variability (HRV), and joint range of motion (ROM) of patients undergoing continuous passive motion (CPM) after total knee replacement surgery.

Method: An experimental design was used. Participants in the experimental group (n = 49) listened to music from 10 min before receiving CPM until the end of the session (25 min in total) on the first and second day following surgery, whereas participants in the control group (n = 42) did not listen to music but rested quietly in bed starting 10 min before and throughout CPM.

Temporally coherent superresolution of textured video via dynamic texture synthesis.

This paper addresses the problem of hallucinating the missing high-resolution (HR) details of a low-resolution (LR) video while maintaining the temporal coherence of the reconstructed HR details using dynamic texture synthesis (DTS). Most existing multiframe-based video superresolution (SR) methods suffer from the problem of limited reconstructed visual quality due to inaccurate subpixel motion estimation between frames in an LR video. To achieve high-quality reconstruction of HR details for an LR video, we propose a texture-synthesis (TS)-based video SR method, in which a novel DTS scheme is proposed to render the reconstructed HR details in a temporally coherent way, which effectively addresses the temporal incoherence problem caused by traditional TS-based image SR methods.