Unraveling the role of gut microbiome in predicting adverse events in neoadjuvant therapy for rectal cancer.

Some patients may develop adverse events during neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy combined with immunotherapy, influencing response rates. The roles of intestinal microbiome and its metabolites in therapeutic adverse events remain unclear. We collected baseline fecal samples from 21 patients with adverse events (AE group) and 11 patients without adverse events (Non-AE group).

Serum ECM1 is a promising biomarker for staging and monitoring fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B.

It is critical to assess the extent and progression of liver fibrosis for patients to receive suitable treatments, but its diagnostic methods remain unmet. Extracellular matrix protein 1 (ECM1) has previously been reported to be a key factor in the induction and progression of liver fibrosis. However, little is known about the use of ECM1 as a biomarker to evaluate fibrosis.

Adaptive physiological and metabolic alterations in Staphylococcus aureus evolution under vancomycin exposure.

Staphylococcus aureus can develop antibiotic resistance and evade immune responses, causing infections in different body sites. However, the metabolic changes underlying this process are poorly understood. A variant strain, C1V, was derived from the parental strain C1 by exposing it to increasing concentrations of vancomycin in vitro.

Harnessing Protein Hydrolysates and Peptides for Hyperuricemia Management: Insights into Sources, Mechanisms, Techniques, and Future Directions.

Hyperuricemia (HUA) is a metabolic disorder characterized by an imbalance in uric acid production and excretion, frequently leading to gout and various chronic conditions. Novel bioactive compounds offer effective alternatives for managing HUA, reducing side effects of traditional medications. Recent studies have highlighted the therapeutic potential of protein hydrolysates and peptides in managing HUA.

MDM2 Is Essential to Maintain the Homeostasis of Epithelial Cells by Targeting p53.

Introduction: MDM2 is known as the primary negative regulator of p53, and MDM2 promotes lung cancer fibrosis and lung injury through p53-dependent and p53-independent pathways. However, the mechanism by which MDM2 influences the pathogenesis of asthma is unknown. In this study, we investigated the function of MDM2 in lung epithelial cells in type 2 lung inflammation.

FEFA: Frequency Enhanced Multi-Modal MRI Reconstruction With Deep Feature Alignment.

Integrating complementary information from multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities is often necessary to make accurate and reliable diagnostic decisions. However, the different acquisition speeds of these modalities mean that obtaining information can be time consuming and require significant effort. Reference-based MRI reconstruction aims to accelerate slower, under-sampled imaging modalities, such as T2-modality, by utilizing redundant information from faster, fully sampled modalities, such as T1-modality.

Memory-Based Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment Network for Radiology Report Generation.

Generating radiology reports automatically reduces the workload of radiologists and helps the diagnoses of specific diseases. Many existing methods take this task as modality transfer process. However, since the key information related to disease accounts for a small proportion in both image and report, it is hard for the model to learn the latent relation between the radiology image and its report, thus failing to generate fluent and accurate radiology reports.

MonoAux: Fully Exploiting Auxiliary Information and Uncertainty for Monocular 3D Object Detection.

Monocular 3D object detection plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving, presenting a formidable challenge by requiring the precise localization of 3D objects within a single image, devoid of depth information. Most existing methods in this domain fall short of harnessing the limited information available in monocular 3D detection tasks. They typically provide only a single detection outcome, omitting essential uncertainty analysis and result post-processing during model inference, thus limiting overall model performance.

Meta-lasso: new insight on infection prediction after minimally invasive surgery.

Surgical site infection (SSI) after minimally invasive lung cancer surgery constitutes an important factor influencing the direct and indirect economic implications, patient prognosis, and the 5-year survival rate for early-stage lung cancer patients. In the realm of predictive healthcare, machine learning algorithms have been instrumental in anticipating various surgical outcomes, including SSI. However, accurately predicting infection after minimally invasive surgery remains a clinical challenge due to the multitude of physiological and surgical factors associated with it.

Salvianolic acid B attenuates liver fibrosis by targeting Ecm1 and inhibiting hepatocyte ferroptosis.

Hepatocyte ferroptosis promotes the pathogenesis and progression of liver fibrosis. Salvianolic acid B (Sal B) exerts antifibrotic effects. However, the pharmacological mechanism and target has not yet been fully elucidated.

Prevalence and molecular characteristics of heterogeneous vancomycin intermediate Staphylococcus aureus in a tertiary care center of northern China.

The use of glycopeptide medications may decline in line with the annual decline in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) detection rates in China. The rate of heterogeneous vancomycin-intermediate Staphylococcus aureus (hVISA)detection may be impacted by this. However, there is currently a dearth of information on the incidence of hVISA in China.

Resistance phenotype and genetic features of a heterogeneous vancomycin intermediate-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strain from an immunocompromised patient.

Strain C1 was successfully isolated from an immunosuppressed patient with persistent bacteremia, who had not previously been exposed to glycopeptide antibiotics. This strain was found to be a heterogeneous vancomycin intermediate-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (hVISA). It is noteworthy that, following a brief period of vancomycin treatment, strains C6, C8, and C9, which were obtained from blood and other body parts, exhibited a significant reduction in heterogeneity as determined by population analysis profile-area under the curve (PAP-AUC) detection.

Evaluation of commercial assays for the assessment of SARS-CoV-2 antibody response in hemodialysis patients.

Background: Hemodialysis patients exhibit variable immunogenicity following administration of the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the use of two commercial assays in the assessment of SARS-CoV-2 antibody response in hemodialysis patients and to compare their utility to commonly used SARS-CoV-2 serological assays developed in Canada.

Methods: We evaluated serologic antibody response in 85 hemodialysis patients up to 6 months after receiving both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

Antibiotics therapy combined with probiotics administered intravaginally for the treatment of bacterial vaginosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

The objective was to examine the pooled effects of antibiotic-probiotic combinations by examining the cure rate and recurrence rate for bacterial vaginosis (BV). A systematic literature search was conducted from electronic databases. All parallel randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that focused on the effects of antibiotics combined with intravaginal probiotics were included.

Solar ultraviolet B radiation promotes α-MSH secretion to attenuate the function of ILC2s via the pituitary-lung axis.

The immunomodulatory effects of ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation in human diseases have been described. Whether type 2 lung inflammation is directly affected by solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation is not fully understood. Here, we show a possible negative correlation between solar UVB radiation and asthmatic inflammation in humans and mice.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells boost CD8 T-cell activation in anti-tumor immune responses.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) are essential for orchestrating type 2 immune responses during allergic airway inflammation and infection. ILC2s have been reported to play a regulatory role in tumors; however, this conclusion is controversial. In this study, we showed that IL-33-activated ILC2s could boost CD8 T-cell function through direct antigen cross-presentation.

The TRIM37 variants in Mulibrey nanism patients paralyze follicular helper T cell differentiation.

The Mulibrey (Muscle-liver-brain-eye) nanism caused by loss-of-function variants in TRIM37 gene is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by severe growth failure and constrictive pericarditis. These patients also suffer from severe respiratory infections, co-incident with an increased mortality rate. Here, we revealed that TRIM37 variants were associated with recurrent infection.

Dual consistent pseudo label generation for multi-source domain adaptation without source data for medical image segmentation.

Introduction: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt a model learned from the source domain to the target domain. Thus, the model can obtain transferable knowledge even in target domain that does not have ground truth in this way. In medical image segmentation scenarios, there exist diverse data distributions caused by intensity in homogeneities and shape variabilities.

[Clinical features and genetic analysis of two children with Williams-Beuren syndrome].

Objective: To explore the clinical and genetic characteristics of two children with Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS).

Methods: Two children who had presented at the Department of Pediatrics, General Hospital of Ningxia Medical University respectively on January 26 and March 18, 2021 were selected as the study subjects. Clinical data and results of genetic testing of the two patients were analyzed.

Molecular epidemiology, antimicrobial susceptibility, and toxin production of clinical Clostridioides difficile isolates from a teaching hospital in Northern China.

To grasp the epidemiological trend and drug resistance mechanisms of Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) in Beijing, 302 C. diff isolates were obtained from patients with diarrhea.

Effects of Omeprazole on Recurrent Clostridioides difficile Infection Caused by ST81 Strains and Their Potential Mechanisms.

Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is associated with high recurrence rates that have substantial effects on patients' quality of life. To investigate the risk factors and potential mechanisms contributing to recurrent CDI (rCDI), a total of 243 cases were enrolled in this study. The history of omeprazole (OME) medication and ST81 strain infection were considered the two independent risks with the highest odds ratios in rCDI.

Vitamin B6 regulates IL-33 homeostasis to alleviate type 2 inflammation.

Interleukin-33 (IL-33) is a crucial nuclear cytokine that induces the type 2 immune response and maintains immune homeostasis. The fine-tuned regulation of IL-33 in tissue cells is critical to control of the type 2 immune response in airway inflammation, but the mechanism is still unclear. Here, we found that healthy individuals had higher phosphate-pyridoxal (PLP, an active form of vitamin B6) concentrations in the serum than asthma patients.

Clinical Validation of the sFlt-1:PlGF Ratio as a Biomarker for Preeclampsia Diagnosis in a High-Risk Obstetrics Unit.

Background: Preeclampsia is a multisystem disorder defined by new onset of hypertension with proteinuria after 20 weeks gestation. In part due to dysregulation of pro-angiogenic factors (e.g.