Comparative performance of fully-automated and semi-automated artificial intelligence methods for the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer on MRI: a systematic review.

Objectives: We systematically reviewed the current literature evaluating the ability of fully-automated deep learning (DL) and semi-automated traditional machine learning (TML) MRI-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods to differentiate clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) from indolent PCa (iPCa) and benign conditions.

Methods: We performed a computerised bibliographic search of studies indexed in MEDLINE/PubMed, arXiv, medRxiv, and bioRxiv between 1 January 2016 and 31 July 2021. Two reviewers performed the title/abstract and full-text screening.

Residual ctDNA after treatment predicts early relapse in patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer.

Background: Identification of residual disease in patients with localized non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following treatment with curative intent holds promise to identify patients at risk of relapse. New methods can detect circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) in plasma to fractional concentrations as low as a few parts per million, and clinical evidence is required to inform their use.

Patients And Methods: We analyzed 363 serial plasma samples from 88 patients with early-stage NSCLC (48.

The Molecular Tumor Board Portal supports clinical decisions and automated reporting for precision oncology.

There is a growing need for systems that efficiently support the work of medical teams at the precision-oncology point of care. Here, we present the implementation of the Molecular Tumor Board Portal (MTBP), an academic clinical decision support system developed under the umbrella of Cancer Core Europe that creates a unified legal, scientific and technological platform to share and harness next-generation sequencing data. Automating the interpretation and reporting of sequencing results decrease the need for time-consuming manual procedures that are prone to errors.

Integrating the OHIF Viewer into XNAT: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects for Quantitative Imaging Studies.

: XNAT is an informatics software platform to support imaging research, particularly in the context of large, multicentre studies of the type that are essential to validate quantitative imaging biomarkers. XNAT provides import, archiving, processing and secure distribution facilities for image and related study data. Until recently, however, modern data visualisation and annotation tools were lacking on the XNAT platform.

Refined characterization of circulating tumor DNA through biological feature integration.

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in blood plasma is present at very low concentrations compared to cell-free DNA (cfDNA) of non-tumor origin. To enhance ctDNA detection, recent studies have been focused on understanding the non-random fragmentation pattern of cfDNA. These studies have investigated fragment sizes, genomic position of fragment end points, and fragment end motifs.

Hyperpolarized C-Pyruvate Metabolism as a Surrogate for Tumor Grade and Poor Outcome in Renal Cell Carcinoma-A Proof of Principle Study.

Differentiating aggressive clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) from indolent lesions is challenging using conventional imaging. This work prospectively compared the metabolic imaging phenotype of renal tumors using carbon-13 MRI following injection of hyperpolarized [1-C]pyruvate (HP-C-MRI) and validated these findings with histopathology. Nine patients with treatment-naïve renal tumors (6 ccRCCs, 1 liposarcoma, 1 pheochromocytoma, 1 oncocytoma) underwent pre-operative HP-C-MRI and conventional proton (H) MRI.

Unified Focal loss: Generalising Dice and cross entropy-based losses to handle class imbalanced medical image segmentation.

Automatic segmentation methods are an important advancement in medical image analysis. Machine learning techniques, and deep neural networks in particular, are the state-of-the-art for most medical image segmentation tasks. Issues with class imbalance pose a significant challenge in medical datasets, with lesions often occupying a considerably smaller volume relative to the background.

Characteristics, origin, and potential for cancer diagnostics of ultrashort plasma cell-free DNA.

Current evidence suggests that plasma cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is fragmented around a mode of 166 bp. Data supporting this view has been mainly acquired through the analysis of double-stranded cfDNA. The characteristics and diagnostic potential of single-stranded and damaged double-stranded cfDNA in healthy individuals and cancer patients remain unclear.

Impact of GAN-based lesion-focused medical image super-resolution on the robustness of radiomic features.

Robust machine learning models based on radiomic features might allow for accurate diagnosis, prognosis, and medical decision-making. Unfortunately, the lack of standardized radiomic feature extraction has hampered their clinical use. Since the radiomic features tend to be affected by low voxel statistics in regions of interest, increasing the sample size would improve their robustness in clinical studies.

Multiparametric MRI for assessment of early response to neoadjuvant sunitinib in renal cell carcinoma.

Purpose: To detect early response to sunitinib treatment in metastatic clear cell renal cancer (mRCC) using multiparametric MRI.

Method: Participants with mRCC undergoing pre-surgical sunitinib therapy in the prospective NeoSun clinical trial (EudraCtNo: 2005-004502-82) were imaged before starting treatment, and after 12 days of sunitinib therapy using morphological MRI sequences, advanced diffusion-weighted imaging, measurements of R2* (related to hypoxia) and dynamic contrast-enhanced imaging. Following nephrectomy, participants continued treatment and were followed-up with contrast-enhanced CT.

Serial assessment of measurable residual disease in medulloblastoma liquid biopsies.

Nearly one-third of children with medulloblastoma, a malignant embryonal tumor of the cerebellum, succumb to their disease. Conventional response monitoring by imaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) cytology remains challenging, and a marker for measurable residual disease (MRD) is lacking. Here, we show the clinical utility of CSF-derived cell-free DNA (cfDNA) as a biomarker of MRD in serial samples collected from children with medulloblastoma (123 patients, 476 samples) enrolled on a prospective trial.

Clinical Translation of Neutrophil Imaging and Its Role in Cancer.

Neutrophils are the first line of defense against pathogens and abnormal cells. They regulate many biological processes such as infections and inflammation. Increasing evidence demonstrated a role for neutrophils in cancer, where different subpopulations have been found to possess both pro- or anti-tumorigenic functions in the tumor microenvironment.

Hyperpolarized Carbon-13 MRI for Early Response Assessment of Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer Patients.

Hyperpolarized C-MRI is an emerging tool for probing tissue metabolism by measuring C-label exchange between intravenously injected hyperpolarized [1-C]pyruvate and endogenous tissue lactate. Here, we demonstrate that hyperpolarized C-MRI can be used to detect early response to neoadjuvant therapy in breast cancer. Seven patients underwent multiparametric H-MRI and hyperpolarized C-MRI before and 7-11 days after commencing treatment.

A Low-Dose CT-Based Radiomic Model to Improve Characterization and Screening Recall Intervals of Indeterminate Prevalent Pulmonary Nodules.

Lung cancer (LC) is currently one of the main causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) of the chest has been proven effective in secondary prevention (i.e.

Multiparametric MRI of early tumor response to immune checkpoint blockade in metastatic melanoma.

Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors are now standard of care treatment for many cancers. Treatment failure in metastatic melanoma is often due to tumor heterogeneity, which is not easily captured by conventional CT or tumor biopsy. The aim of this prospective study was to investigate early microstructural and functional changes within melanoma metastases following immune checkpoint blockade using multiparametric MRI.

Dynamic biomarker and imaging changes from a phase II study of pre- and post-surgical sunitinib.

Objective: To explore translational biological and imaging biomarkers for sunitinib treatment before and after debulking nephrectomy in the NeoSun (European Union Drug Regulating Authorities Clinical Trials Database [EudraCT] number: 2005-004502-82) single-centre, single-arm, single-agent, Phase II trial.

Patients And Methods: Treatment-naïve patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) received 50 mg once daily sunitinib for 12 days pre-surgically, then post-surgery on 4 week-on, 2 week-off, repeating 6-week cycles until disease progression in a single arm phase II trial. Structural and dynamic contrast-enhanced magnet resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) and research blood sampling were performed at baseline and after 12 days.

Serial changes in tumour measurements and apparent diffusion coefficients in prostate cancer patients on active surveillance with and without histopathological progression.

Objective: To analyse serial changes in MRI-derived tumour measurements and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values in prostate cancer (PCa) patients on active surveillance (AS) with and without histopathological disease progression.

Methods: This study included AS patients with biopsy-proven PCa with a minimum of two consecutive MR examinations and at least one repeat targeted biopsy. Tumour volumes, largest axial two-dimensional (2D) surface areas, and maximum diameters were measured on weighted images (WI).

DNA methylation landscapes of 1538 breast cancers reveal a replication-linked clock, epigenomic instability and cis-regulation.

DNA methylation is aberrant in cancer, but the dynamics, regulatory role and clinical implications of such epigenetic changes are still poorly understood. Here, reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) profiles of 1538 breast tumors and 244 normal breast tissues from the METABRIC cohort are reported, facilitating detailed analysis of DNA methylation within a rich context of genomic, transcriptional, and clinical data. Tumor methylation from immune and stromal signatures are deconvoluted leading to the discovery of a tumor replication-linked clock with genome-wide methylation loss in non-CpG island sites.

The Porto European Cancer Research Summit 2021.

Key stakeholders from the cancer research continuum met in May 2021 at the European Cancer Research Summit in Porto to discuss priorities and specific action points required for the successful implementation of the European Cancer Mission and Europe's Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). Speakers presented a unified view about the need to establish high-quality, networked infrastructures to decrease cancer incidence, increase the cure rate, improve patient's survival and quality of life, and deal with research and care inequalities across the European Union (EU). These infrastructures, featuring Comprehensive Cancer Centres (CCCs) as key components, will integrate care, prevention and research across the entire cancer continuum to support the development of personalized/precision cancer medicine in Europe.

Focus U-Net: A novel dual attention-gated CNN for polyp segmentation during colonoscopy.

Background: Colonoscopy remains the gold-standard screening for colorectal cancer. However, significant miss rates for polyps have been reported, particularly when there are multiple small adenomas. This presents an opportunity to leverage computer-aided systems to support clinicians and reduce the number of polyps missed.

FiCoS: A fine-grained and coarse-grained GPU-powered deterministic simulator for biochemical networks.

Mathematical models of biochemical networks can largely facilitate the comprehension of the mechanisms at the basis of cellular processes, as well as the formulation of hypotheses that can be tested by means of targeted laboratory experiments. However, two issues might hamper the achievement of fruitful outcomes. On the one hand, detailed mechanistic models can involve hundreds or thousands of molecular species and their intermediate complexes, as well as hundreds or thousands of chemical reactions, a situation generally occurring in rule-based modeling.

A Computational Study on Temperature Variations in MRgFUS Treatments Using PRF Thermometry Techniques and Optical Probes.

Structural and metabolic imaging are fundamental for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up in oncology. Beyond the well-established diagnostic imaging applications, ultrasounds are currently emerging in the clinical practice as a noninvasive technology for therapy. Indeed, the sound waves can be used to increase the temperature inside the target solid tumors, leading to apoptosis or necrosis of neoplastic tissues.