Publications by authors named "Kitano H"

Objectives: To evaluate the safety, efficacy, and patient-reported outcomes of Aquablation therapy using the AQUABEAM Robotic System for the treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) due to benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) in a Japanese population.

Methods: This post-market use-results survey included 103 Japanese men with BPH who underwent Aquablation across five centers with previously Aquablation naïve physicians. Data were collected at baseline, during the procedure, at discharge, and at 3 and 6 months post-procedure.

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In present investigation, the effort is done to enhance the grain quality in brewer's rice cultivar Yamadanishiki with the plasma treatment of caryopsis (rice fruit) on ripening process. Seedlings transplanted from a paddy field into pots were grown in a greenhouse, and each caryopsis was treated with plasma on 1, 5, 10 and 15 days after flowering (DAF). The ratio of white-core grains to total number of grains was decreased in the grains treated on DAF1, same level on DAF5, and increased on DAF10 and 15, respectively, compared with control grains.

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This current case report describes a Japanese woman in her 80s with xerostomia who presented with salivary gland dysfunction. She was positive for isolated anti-Ro52/SS-A antibody as determined by a chemiluminescent enzyme immunoassay and positive on a fluorescence enzyme immunoassay that recognizes both Ro52 and Ro60 antigens. A high serum concentration of anti-Ro52/SS-A antibody was determined by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.

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Background: Surgical treatment of pheochromocytomas is associated with circulatory dynamics instability, necessitating systemic management of the patient in the intensive care unit after surgery. Early mobilization after pheochromocytoma surgery is not described in the guidelines, and to our knowledge, no reports have specifically focused on circulatory dynamics during early mobilization after surgery.

Case Presentation: A 31-year-old Japanese woman was diagnosed with bilateral pheochromocytoma and underwent a second-stage adrenalectomy for bilateral pheochromocytoma at our hospital.

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Aims: To investigate the significance of regulatory T cells (Tregs) and programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) in the vitreous of patients with vitreoretinal lymphoma (VRL) and uveitis.

Methods: This study involved 51 patients with VRL and uveitis, 15 males and 36 females (mean age: 72 years, range: 51-86 years), who underwent vitrectomy at the Department of Ophthalmology, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan, from December 2019 to February 2024. All patients underwent lymphocyte surface antigen analysis via flow cytometry, and the proportion of Tregs in CD4 T lymphocytes and PD-1 CTLs in CD8 T lymphocytes was measured.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Utilizing a multidisciplinary team meeting (MDTM) before robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) for pT2 prostate cancer significantly reduces the rate of positive surgical margins (PSM), indicating improved surgical outcomes.
  • - In cases reviewed by the MDTM, the PSM rate was notably lower (11.1%) compared to those that weren't evaluated (24.0%), with key predictors for PSM including PSA levels and nerve-sparing procedures.
  • - The MDTM's effectiveness in lowering PSM rates appears consistent regardless of the surgeon's experience level, suggesting that collaborative evaluation before surgery is beneficial for patient outcomes.
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Introduction: Fungal balls in the urinary tract are rare but dangerous complications of candiduria. Here, we report a case of a urinary tract fungal ball in a single kidney after total nephroureterocystectomy.

Case Presentation: The patient was an 80-year-old male.

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: We examined the frequency of zinc deficiency in patients with Sjögren's syndrome (SS) and the relationship between zinc deficiency and each of the subjective symptoms and disease activity. : We enrolled 164 patients aged ≥ 20 years with primary SS (pSS) based on the revised diagnostic criteria of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (1999) and 144 patients with RA diagnosed according to the ACR/EULAR classification criteria for RA (2010) as a comparison group. Subjective symptoms were confirmed using an original questionnaire, and disease activity was determined using the European League Against Rheumatism Sjögren's Syndrome Disease Activity Index (ESSDAI).

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Objectives: This study aimed to elucidate the clinical characteristics and predictors of long-term postoperative urinary incontinence (PUI) after robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP).

Methods: This study included patients who underwent RARP at our institution and were stratified into PUI (≥1 pad/day) and continence (0 pad/day) groups at 60 months after RARP. A propensity score-matched analysis with multiple preoperative urinary status (Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite urinary subdomains, total International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS), and IPSS-quality of life scores) was performed to match preoperative urinary status in these groups.

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Manufacturing regenerative medicine requires continuous monitoring of pluripotent cell culture and quality assessment while eliminating cell destruction and contaminants. In this study, we employed a novel method to monitor the pluripotency of stem cells through image analysis, avoiding the traditionally used invasive procedures. This approach employs machine learning algorithms to analyze stem cell images to predict the expression of pluripotency markers, such as OCT4 and NANOG, without physically interacting with or harming cells.

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Objective: To assess the association among preoperative total testosterone levels, postoperative sexual function, and prognosis after robot-assisted radical prostatectomy.

Methods: Patients who underwent robot-assisted radical prostatectomy in our institution were included in the study. Based on preoperative total testosterone levels, they were divided into low (<3.

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Acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL) is a form of acute myelogenous leukaemia. APL is characterised by anaemia due to suppression of normal haematopoiesis and infection. Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is current option for the treatment of haematopoietic malignancies and is proving to be successful.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Recent research indicates the need to understand how hydronephrosis (HN) affects muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), as previous studies showed mixed results regarding its significance and molecular characteristics.
  • - An analysis of 108 MIBC patients revealed that those with HN had a higher occurrence of the luminal papillary subtype and increased FGFR3 mutations compared to those without HN.
  • - Ultimately, while MIBC with HN shows increased FGFR3 mutations, it's the reduced renal function, not HN itself, that is linked to poor overall survival in patients.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzed antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of 793 bacterial strains from patients with complicated urinary tract infections across eight species, using national surveillance data collected in Japan from July 2020 to December 2021.
  • Fluoroquinolone resistance, particularly among Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, has risen over the years, with levofloxacin resistance in E. coli increasing from 28.6% in 2008 to 44.5% in 2021, while MRSA vancomycin susceptibility decreased significantly.
  • Extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing strains were identified in notable proportions, with E. coli (24.8%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (16
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Background: Vagococcal infections are extremely rare in humans. There are limited studies on the optimal methods for identification, antimicrobial susceptibility testing, and clinical manifestations of vagococcal infections. Herein, we report a patient with a urinary tract infection who had Vagococcus fluvialis in the urine.

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Viruses are an abundant and crucial component of the human microbiome, but accurately discovering them via metagenomics is still challenging. Currently, the available viral reference genomes poorly represent the diversity in microbiome samples, and expanding such a set of viral references is difficult. As a result, many viruses are still undetectable through metagenomics even when considering the power of metagenomic assembly and binning, as viruses lack universal markers.

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Introduction: Nuclear envelope spectrin repeat protein (Nesprin) 1 encoded by SYNE1, crucially regulates the morphology and functions of the cell. Mutations in the SYNE1 gene are associated with various diseases; however, their significance in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) remains unknown. In this study, we have investigated the association of SYNE1/Nesprin1 with the progression and prognosis of clear cell RCC (ccRCC).

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With the advancement of large-scale omics technologies, particularly transcriptomics data sets on drug and treatment response repositories available in public domain, toxicogenomics has emerged as a key field in safety pharmacology and chemical risk assessment. Traditional statistics-based bioinformatics analysis poses challenges in its application across multidimensional toxicogenomic data, including administration time, dosage, and gene expression levels. Motivated by the visual inspection workflow of field experts to augment their efficiency of screening significant genes to derive meaningful insights, together with the ability of deep neural architectures to learn the image signals, we developed DTox, a deep neural network-based in visio approach.

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Introduction: The COVID-19 Disease Map project is a large-scale community effort uniting 277 scientists from 130 Institutions around the globe. We use high-quality, mechanistic content describing SARS-CoV-2-host interactions and develop interoperable bioinformatic pipelines for novel target identification and drug repurposing.

Methods: Extensive community work allowed an impressive step forward in building interfaces between Systems Biology tools and platforms.

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To propose the centrality angle (C-angle) as a novel simple nephrometry score for the evaluation of tumor complexity and prediction of perioperative outcomes in nephron-sparing surgery (NSS) for renal tumors. The analysis was based on 174 patients who underwent robot-assisted partial nephrectomy retrospectively. C-angle was defined as the angle occupied by the tumor from the center of the kidney in the coronal CT images.

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Background: The field of robotic surgery is still continuously advancing, with several cutting-edge robotic systems currently under development. This study aimed to present the methodology and perioperative outcomes of robot-assisted radical cystectomy (RARC) and intracorporeal urinary diversion (ICUD) in patient with muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) by utilizing the hinotori Surgical Robot System, a recently developed robot-assisted surgical platform.

Case Description: A 79-year-old man with MIBC, cT2N0M0, received RARC and ICUD after two courses of neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluates the modified 5-item frailty index's effectiveness in predicting outcomes for patients undergoing radical nephroureterectomy for upper tract urothelial carcinoma.
  • It categorizes patients into high and low frailty index groups, finding that those with higher scores experienced more severe complications and poorer survival rates.
  • The results highlight the modified frailty index as a crucial tool for assessing surgical risk and predicting postoperative outcomes in these patients.
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Effective and precise mammalian transcriptome engineering technologies are needed to accelerate biological discovery and RNA therapeutics. Despite the promise of programmable CRISPR-Cas13 ribonucleases, their utility has been hampered by an incomplete understanding of guide RNA design rules and cellular toxicity resulting from off-target or collateral RNA cleavage. Here, we quantified the performance of over 127,000 RfxCas13d (CasRx) guide RNAs and systematically evaluated seven machine learning models to build a guide efficiency prediction algorithm orthogonally validated across multiple human cell types.

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In the realm of music information retrieval, similarity-based retrieval and auto-tagging serve as essential components. Similarity-based retrieval involves automatically analyzing a music track and fetching analogous tracks from a database. Auto-tagging, on the other hand, assesses a music track to deduce associated tags, such as genre and mood.

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