Automated Image Clarity Detection for the Improvement of Colposcopy Imaging with Multiple Devices.

Unlabelled: The proportion of women dying from cervical cancer in middle- and low-income countries is over 60%, twice that of their high-income counterparts. A primary screening strategy to eliminate this burden is cervix visualization and application of 3-5% acetic acid, inducing contrast in potential lesions. Recently, machine learning tools have emerged to aid visual diagnosis.

A novel development of hybrid maximum power point tracking controller for solar pv systems with wide voltage gain DC-DC converter.

Now, the present power generation and distribution companies are working on renewable energy systems because their features are low-level atmospheric pollution, producing less greenhouse pollutants, more reliability, good static performance, and high robustness. In this work, the sunlight Photovoltaic (PV) system is selected because of its advantages are easily available in the atmosphere, high flexibility, zero carbon footprint, easy to maintain, and less transportation cost. However, solar networks produce nonlinear I-V characteristics.

Determining the Relationship between Delivery Parameters and Ablation Distribution for Novel Gel Ethanol Percutaneous Therapy in Ex Vivo Swine Liver.

Ethyl cellulose-ethanol (ECE) is emerging as a promising formulation for ablative injections, with more controllable injection distributions than those from traditional liquid ethanol. This study evaluates the influence of salient injection parameters on forces needed for infusion, depot volume, retention, and shape in a large animal model relevant to human applications. Experiments were conducted to investigate how infusion volume (0.

Optical imaging reveals chemotherapy-induced metabolic reprogramming of residual disease and recurrence.

Fewer than 20% of triple-negative breast cancer patients experience long-term responses to mainstay chemotherapy. Resistant tumor subpopulations use alternative metabolic pathways to escape therapy, survive, and eventually recur. Here, we show in vivo, longitudinal metabolic reprogramming in residual disease and recurrence of triple-negative breast cancer xenografts with varying sensitivities to the chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel.

Multiscale Optical Imaging Fusion for Cervical Precancer Diagnosis: Integrating Widefield Colposcopy and High-Resolution Endomicroscopy.

Objective: Early detection and treatment of cervical precancers can prevent disease progression. However, in low-resource communities with a high incidence of cervical cancer, high equipment costs and a shortage of specialists hinder preventative strategies. This manuscript presents a low-cost multiscale in vivo optical imaging system coupled with a computer-aided diagnostic system that could enable accurate, real-time diagnosis of high-grade cervical precancers.

A color-based tumor segmentation method for clinical ex vivo breast tissue assessment utilizing a multi-contrast brightfield imaging strategy.

We demonstrate an automated two-step tumor segmentation method leveraging color information from brightfield images of fresh core needle biopsies of breast tissue. Three different color spaces (HSV, CIELAB, YCbCr) were explored for the segmentation task. By leveraging white-light and green-light images, we identified two different types of color transformations that could separate adipose from benign and tumor or cancerous tissue.

Impact of Injection-Based Delivery Parameters on Local Distribution Volume of Ethyl-Cellulose Ethanol Gel in Tissue and Tissue Mimicking Phantoms.

Objective: Local drug delivery aims to minimize systemic toxicity by preventing off-target effects; however, injection parameters influencing depot formation of injectable gels have yet to be thoroughly studied. We explored the effects of needle characteristics, injection depth, rate, volume, and polymer concentration on gel ethanol distribution in both tissue and phantoms.

Methods: The polymer ethyl cellulose (EC) was added to ethanol to form an injectable gel to ablate cervical precancer and cancer.

In Vivo Evaluation of Safety and Efficacy of Ethyl Cellulose-Ethanol Tissue Ablation in a Swine Cervix Model.

Current therapies for treating cervical dysplasia are often inaccessible in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), highlighting the need for novel low-cost therapies that can be delivered at the point of care. Ethanol ablation is a low-cost therapy designed to treat locoregional cancers, which we augmented into an ethyl cellulose (EC)-ethanol gel formulation to enhance its efficacy. Here, we evaluated whether EC-ethanol ablation is able to safely achieve an ablation zone comparable to thermocoagulation, a commonly used therapy for cervical dysplasia.

Adaptive Design of Fluorescence Imaging Systems for Custom Resolution, Fields of View, and Geometries.

We developed a generalized computational approach to design uniform, high-intensity excitation light for low-cost, quantitative fluorescence imaging of in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo samples with a single device. Fluorescence imaging is a ubiquitous tool for biomedical applications. Researchers extensively modify existing systems for tissue imaging, increasing the time and effort needed for translational research and thick tissue imaging.

Locoregional Thermal and Chemical Tumor Ablation: Review of Clinical Applications and Potential Opportunities for Use in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

This review highlights opportunities to develop accessible ablative therapies to reduce the cancer burden in LMICs.

Metabolic Imaging as a Tool to Characterize Chemoresistance and Guide Therapy in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC).

After an initial response to chemotherapy, tumor relapse is frequent. This event is reflective of both the spatiotemporal heterogeneities of the tumor microenvironment as well as the evolutionary propensity of cancer cell populations to adapt to variable conditions. Because the cause of this adaptation could be genetic or epigenetic, studying phenotypic properties such as tumor metabolism is useful as it reflects molecular, cellular, and tissue-level dynamics.

A Clinical Study to Assess Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy with an Auto-Calibrated, Pressure-Sensing Optical Probe in Head and Neck Cancer.

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) is a powerful tool for quantifying optical and physiological tissue properties such as hemoglobin oxygen saturation and vascularity. DRS is increasingly used clinically for distinguishing cancerous lesions from normal tissue. However, its widespread clinical acceptance is still limited due to uncontrolled probe-tissue interface pressure that influences reproducibility and introduces operator-dependent results.

Can portable Colposcopes Replace Standard-of-care Colposcopes? A Crossover Trial of Two Portable Colposcopes with a Standard-of-Care Video Colposcope.

Background: Screen positive women need to be triaged by colposcopy which is a major challenge in low-middle income countries. Portable colposcopes may overcome many challenges, reduce referrals and enable a single visit approach. This study assessed the performance of portable colposcopes and potential to reduce referral.

Cervical Cancer-Related Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices and Self-Screening Acceptance Among Patients, Employees, and Social Media Followers of Major Brazilian Hospital.

Background: Brazil has a high burden of cervical cancer, even though it is preventable, traceable and treatable. Hence, this study evaluated levels of knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) related to cervical cancer screening and diagnosis and acceptance of self-screening techniques among women aged 24 and greater.

Methods: A cross-sectional KAP survey was administered to n = 4206 women and spanned questions relating to cervical cancer, HPV, speculum, Pap test and colposcopy.

Development of a multimodal mobile colposcope for real-time cervical cancer detection.

Cervical cancer remains a leading cause of cancer death among women in low-and middle-income countries. Globally, cervical cancer prevention programs are hampered by a lack of resources, infrastructure, and personnel. We describe a multimodal mobile colposcope (MMC) designed to diagnose precancerous cervical lesions at the point-of-care without the need for biopsy.

Ethanol Ablation Therapy Drives Immune-Mediated Antitumor Effects in Murine Breast Cancer Models.

Ethanol ablation is a minimally invasive, cost-effective method of destroying tumor tissue through an intratumoral injection of high concentrations of cytotoxic alcohol. Ethyl-cellulose ethanol (ECE) ablation, a modified version of ethanol ablation, contains the phase-changing polysaccharide ethyl-cellulose to reduce ethanol leakage away from the tumor. Ablation produces tissue necrosis and initiates a wound healing process; however, the characteristic of the immunologic events after ECE ablation of tumors has yet to be explored.

Multicontrast Pocket Colposcopy Cervical Cancer Diagnostic Algorithm for Referral Populations.

. We use deep learning models to classify cervix images-collected with a low-cost, portable Pocket colposcope-with biopsy-confirmed high-grade precancer and cancer. We boost classification performance on a screened-positive population by using a class-balanced loss and incorporating green-light colposcopy image pairs, which come at no additional cost to the provider.

Targeting Tumor Acidosis and Regulatory T Cells Unmasks Anti-Metastatic Potential of Local Tumor Ablation in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an immunologically heterogenous disease that lacks clinically actionable targets and is more likely to progress to metastatic disease than other types of breast cancer. Tumor ablation has been used to increase response rates to checkpoint inhibitors, which remain low for TNBC patients. We hypothesized that tumor ablation could produce an anti-tumor response without using checkpoint inhibitors if immunosuppression (i.

Evaluation of Women's Empowerment in a Community-Based Human Papillomavirus Self-Sampling Social Entrepreneurship Program (Hope Project) in Peru: A Mixed-Method Study.

Introduction: Understanding community women's relational and financial empowerment in social entrepreneurship could be the key to scaling up community-based human papillomavirus (HPV) self-sampling programs in low- and middle-income countries. The Hope Project, social entrepreneurship in Peru, trains women (Hope Ladies) to promote HPV self-sampling among other women in their communities. This study aims to evaluate the Hope Ladies' relational and financial empowerment after participating in the program.

A Spectroscopic Technique to Simultaneously Characterize Fatty Acid Uptake, Mitochondrial Activity, Vascularity, and Oxygen Saturation for Longitudinal Studies In Vivo.

Aggressive breast cancer has been shown to shift its metabolism towards increased lipid catabolism as the primary carbon source for oxidative phosphorylation. In this study, we present a technique to longitudinally monitor lipid metabolism and oxidative phosphorylation in pre-clinical tumor models to investigate the metabolic changes with mammary tissue development and characterize metabolic differences between primary murine breast cancer and normal mammary tissue. We used optical spectroscopy to measure the signal of two simultaneously injected exogenous fluorescent metabolic reporters: TMRE (oxidative phosphorylation surrogate) and Bodipy FL C16 (lipid catabolism surrogate).

[F]Fluoro-DCP, a first generation PET radiotracer for monitoring protein sulfenylation in vivo.

Redox metabolism plays essential functions in the pathology of cancer and many other diseases. While several radiotracers for imaging redox metabolism have been developed, there are no reports of radiotracers for in vivo imaging of protein oxidation. Here we take the first step towards this goal and describe the synthesis and kinetic properties of a new positron emission tomography (PET) [F]Fluoro-DCP radiotracer for in vivo imaging of protein sulfenylation.

Policy Considerations to Promote Equitable Cervical Cancer Screening and Treatment in Peru.

Background: Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of death among Peruvian women. Women seeking screening or treatment services experience delays in receiving screening results provided at community clinics or district hospitals, and lack sufficient resources to pay out-of-pocket to travel to the capital city of Lima for specialized treatment. Continued disparities in health outcomes and systemic barriers to accessing services suggest there are gaps between policy measures and implementation.

Serum thromboxane B2 but not soluble P-selectin levels identify ischemic stroke patients with persistent platelet reactivity while on aspirin therapy.

Background: Aspirin non-response due to persistent platelet reactivity has been associated with adverse vascular events. Light transmission aggregometry (LTA), the 'gold standard' for measuring the platelet response to aspirin therapy, is a cumbersome procedure and a simple and reliable alternative is required. Our aim was to explore whether serum thromboxane B2 (sTXB2) and soluble P-selectin can be used to identify patients who are at risk of increased platelet reactivity while on aspirin.