Aristolochic Acids and Aristoloxazines Are Widespread in the Soil of Aristolochiaceae Herb Cultivation Fields.

The cancer risk associated with aristolochic acid (AA) exposure through the consumption of AA-containing herbal medicine has received tremendous attention in the past decades. However, environmental exposure routes from the associated medicinal herb cultivation fields have received little attention. We reveal through liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analysis of over 400 soil samples collected from three different Aristolochiaceae herb cultivation fields that AAs, which are nephrotoxic and carcinogenic, and aristoloxazines (AXs), a family of recently identified neurotoxic and genotoxic AA analogues, are widespread pollutants in these areas.

Prevalence and factors associated with diabetes-related distress in type 2 diabetes patients: a study in Hong Kong primary care setting.

Diabetes-related distress (DRD) refers to the psychological distress specific to living with diabetes. DRD can lead to negative clinical consequences such as poor self-management. By knowing the local prevalence and severity of DRD, primary care teams can improve the DRD evaluation in our daily practice.

Accelerating 4D image reconstruction for magnetic resonance-guided radiotherapy.

Background And Purpose: Physiological motion impacts the dose delivered to tumours and vital organs in external beam radiotherapy and particularly in particle therapy. The excellent soft-tissue demarcation of 4D magnetic resonance imaging (4D-MRI) could inform on intra-fractional motion, but long image reconstruction times hinder its use in online treatment adaptation. Here we employ techniques from high-performance computing to reduce 4D-MRI reconstruction times below two minutes to facilitate their use in MR-guided radiotherapy.

Gadoxetic acid in hepatocellular carcinoma and liver metastases: pearls and pitfalls.

Gadoxetic disodium (Primovist) is a hepatocyte-specific magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent with increasing popularity with its unique dual dynamic and excretory properties in focal liver lesion detection and characterisation. In-depth knowledge of its diagnostic utility and pitfalls in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and liver metastases is crucial in facilitating clinical management. The current article reviews the pearls and pitfalls in these aspects with highlights from the latest research evidence.

Distributed large-scale graph processing on FPGAs.

Processing large-scale graphs is challenging due to the nature of the computation that causes irregular memory access patterns. Managing such irregular accesses may cause significant performance degradation on both CPUs and GPUs. Thus, recent research trends propose graph processing acceleration with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA).