Contact X-ray Brachytherapy as a sole treatment in selected patients with early rectal cancer - Multi-centre study.

Background And Purpose: Radical surgery is the standard of care for early rectal cancer. However, alternative organ-preserving approaches are attractive, especially in frail or elderly patients as these avoid surgical complications. We have assessed the efficacy of sole Contact X-ray Brachytherapy (CXB) treatment in stage-1 rectal cancer patients who were unsuitable for or declined surgery.

The diagnostic methods in the COVID-19 pandemic, today and in the future.

Introduction: The emergence of anovel coronavirus identified in patients with unknown cause of acute respiratory disease in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 has caused aglobal outbreak. The causative coronavirus was later named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was named as Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19). As of 10 August 2020, more than 19,718,030 confirmed cases and 728,013 deaths have been reported.

The effect of enhancing temporal periodicity cues on Cantonese tone recognition by cochlear implantees.

Objectives: This study investigates the efficacy of a cochlear implant (CI) processing method that enhances temporal periodicity cues of speech.

Design: Subjects participated in word and tone identification tasks. Two processing conditions - the conventional advanced combination encoder (ACE) and tone-enhanced ACE were tested.