Cost-effectiveness analysis of eribulin versus dacarbazine in patients with advanced liposarcoma.

A subgroup analysis of a randomized study demonstrated that patients with advanced or metastatic liposarcoma treated with eribulin had longer overall survival and progression-free survival compared to those treated with dacarbazine, suggesting eribulin as a therapeutic option for advanced liposarcoma. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of eribulin versus dacarbazine in the treatment of advanced liposarcoma. We established a 10-year Markov model to compare the cost-effectiveness of eribulin and dacarbazine regimens.

A novel dynamic vibration absorber for vibration control of piping systems under multi-frequency harmonic excitations.

To suppress the significant vibration line spectra of piping systems under multi-frequency harmonic excitations, a novel dynamic vibration absorber (NDVA) is designed. The NDVA integrates numerous independent resonant units within a finite space through an ingenious structural design and possesses rich frequency regulation characteristics. A vibration model of the piping system equipped with the NDVA is established, and the approximate equivalent parameters of both the piping and the resonant units are inverted based on the frequency response function (FRF) test results.

Bioinformatic analysis of ferroptosis related biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets in vitiligo.

Vitiligo is a complex autoimmune skin disorder characterized by depigmentation and immune dysregulation. To elucidate the role of ferroptosis-related genes (FRGs) in vitiligo, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of gene expression data from the GSE53146 and GSE65127 datasets obtained from the GEO database. We identified 31 differentially expressed FRGs (DE-FRGs), with 21 genes upregulated and 10 downregulated.

Unloading damage evolution and rockburst risk assessment of Xuefengshan No.1 tunnel by combining multiple approaches.

Large-scale rock burst disasters often occur in high-stress and deep-buried tunnels, due to challenges in accurate forecasting and the lack of clarity regarding the underlying mechanisms largely. This study combined on-site stress drilling tests, coupled finite and discrete element simulations, and theoretical calculations to examine unloading damage, rockburst evolution, and deformation failure of the high-stress and deep-buried Xuefengshan No.1 tunnel.

Pyrithione zinc alters mismatch repair to trigger tumor immunogenicity.

Mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR) cancers are highly sensitive to immunotherapy, but only account for a small fraction of cancer patients. How to increase immunotherapy efficacy on MMR-proficient (pMMR) cancer is still a major challenge. This study demonstrates that pyrithione zinc (PYZ), an FDA-approved drug, can enhance tumor immunogenicity via altering MMR and activating STING signaling.

Assessment of mechanical properties and durability of compressed mud bricks stabilized with stone dust, wheat straw, and cement.

For millennia mud has been utilized to make brick for the construction of both residential as well as architectural purposes. However, concerns regarding their vulnerability to different kinds of hazards due to their weak mechanical properties and durability have emerged. This study addressed the global challenge of developing sustainable and affordable construction materials, particularly in resource-constrained regions.

Clinical characteristics and laparoscopic management experience of primary ovarian leiomyoma.

Primary leiomyoma is one of the rarest benign ovarian tumors. Since the first case was identified, less than 100 cases have been reported worldwide. This study aimed to analyze the clinical characteristics and discuss the proper management of this tumor.

Elucidating the role of pyrimidine metabolism in prostate cancer and its therapeutic implications.

Our study aims to investigate the role of pyrimidine metabolism in prostate cancer and its associations with the immune microenvironment, drug sensitivity, and tumor mutation burden. Through transcriptomic and single-cell RNA sequencing analyses, we explored metabolic pathway enrichment, immune infiltration patterns, and differential gene expression in prostate cancer samples. The results showed that pyrimidine metabolism-related genes were significantly upregulated in the P2 subgroup compared to the P1 subgroup, with enhanced metabolic activity observed in basal and luminal epithelial cells.

Identifying risk factors and constructing a predictive model for heart failure combined with intracardiac thrombus in non-compaction cardiomyopathy patients.

This study aims to develop a nomogram prediction model for assessing the cardiogenic composite endpoint, which includes intracardiac thrombosis (ICT) combined with heart failure (HF) in patients with non-compaction cardiomyopathy (NCM) patients. We retrospectively analyzed clinical data from NCM patients (January 2018 to May 2024), who were randomly assigned to training and validation cohorts. Independent predictors were identified using logistic regression, and a nomogram model was developed.

FOXG1 promotes osteogenesis of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells by activating autophagy through regulating USP14.

The osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) is key for bone formation, and its imbalance leads to osteoporosis. Forkhead Box Protein G1 (FOXG1) is associated with osteogenesis, however, the effect of FOXG1 on osteogenesis of BMSCs and ovariectomy (OVX)-induced bone loss is unknown. In our study, FOXG1 expression in BMSCs increases after osteogenic induction.

Erythrocyte modified controlling nutritional status as a biomarker for predicting poor prognosis in post-surgery breast cancer patients.

Nutrition and inflammation are closely related to prognosis in breast cancer patients. However, current nutritional and inflammatory measures predict disease free survival (DFS) of breast cancer are still different, and the most predictive measures remain unknown. This study aimed to compare the predictive effects of commonly used nutritional and inflammatory measures on DFS and to improve existing nutritional or inflammatory measures in order to develop a new model that is more effective for predicting postoperative recurrence and metastasis in breast cancer patients.

Stability of small incision lenticule extraction over laser in situ keratomileusis at an altitude of 3874 m.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the stability of small-incision lenticule extraction (SMILE) and laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) when ascending from near sea level to an altitude of 3874 m. The visual acuity (VA), intraocular pressure (IOP), spherical equivalent refraction (SER) and biometric parameters of 20 normal subjects (40 eyes, controls) and 36 subjects who underwent corneal refractive surgery (35 eyes with SMILE and 36 eyes with LASIK) were examined in Chongqing (C, 500 m above sea level) and 7-10 days after a collective travel to Shigatse (S, 3874 m above sea level). SER and corneal thickness (CT) were choosed as main indicators of the stability of corneal refractive surgery at high altitude.

Machine learning analysis of cervical balance in early-onset scoliosis post-growing rod surgery: a case-control study.

We aimed to analyze the cervical sagittal alignment change following the growing rod treatment in early-onset scoliosis (EOS) and identify the risk factors of sagittal cervical imbalance after growing-rod surgery of machine learning. EOS patients from our centre between 2007 and 2019 were retrospectively reviewed. Radiographic parameters include the cervical lordosis (CL), T1 slope, C2-C7 sagittal vertical axis (C2-7 SVA), primary curve Cobb angle, thoracic kyphosis (TK), C7-S1 sagittal vertical axis (C7-S1 SVA) and proximal junctional angle (PJA) were evaluated preoperatively, postoperatively and at the final follow-up.

Chromosome-level genome assembly and annotation of largemouth bronze gudgeon (Coreius guichenoti).

Coreius guichenoti, mainly distributed in upstream regions of the Yangtze River China, is currently on the brink of extinction and listed as national secondary protected animal. In this study, we aimed to obtain the chromosome-level genome of C. guichenoti using PacBio and Hi-C techniques.

Extracting organs of interest from medical images based on convolutional neural network with auxiliary and refined constraints.

Accurately extracting organs from medical images provides radiologist with more comprehensive evidences to clinical diagnose, which offers up a higher accuracy and efficiency. However, the key to achieving accurate segmentation lies in abundant clues for contour distinction, which has a high demand for the network architecture design and its practical training status. To this end, we design auxiliary and refined constraints to optimize the energy function by supplying additional guidance in training procedure, thus promoting model's ability to capture information.

Near complete genome assembly of Yadong trout (Salmo trutta).

The Yadong trout (Salmo trutta), a species endemic to the Yatung River in Tibet, China, was classified as a second-class protected species in the 20th century. Now, it is considered one of the most important fishery resources in China. In this study, we assembled a near-complete genome of the S.

Identification of critical endoplasmic reticulum stress-related genes in advanced atherosclerotic plaque.

Atherosclerosis (AS) is the principal pathological cause of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases. Chronic endoplasmic reticulum stress (ERS) has been implicated in AS aetiopathogenesis, but the underlying molecular interactions remain unclear. This study aims to identify the molecular mechanisms of ERS in AS pathogenesis to inform innovative diagnostic approaches and therapeutic targets for managing AS.

Association between air pollution and lifestyle with the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment and dementia in individuals with cardiometabolic diseases.

Lifestyle factors and ambient air pollution are linked to dementia and CMDs, yet few studies have investigated their impact on dementia risk in CMDs patients at the same time. The Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate the influence of lifestyle and ambient air pollution on the dementia risk of the CMDs population among 438,681 participants in the UK Biobank. It is found that the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment and dementia in the population seems to increase with the increase in the number of CMDs.

A network meta-analysis of therapies for hyperphosphatemia in CKD based on randomized trials.

To update the efficacy and safety of different drugs for the treatment of patients with hyperphosphatemia in chronic kidney disease, we conducted a network meta-analysis of 22 therapies for the treatment of uncontrolled hyperphosphatemia in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). All randomized controlled trials on hyperphosphatemia published from January 2013 to November 2023 were searched from CNKI, VIP database, Wanfang database, PubMed, Scopus, and Cochrane databases. Meta-analysis was used to evaluate the serum phosphorus, calcium levels, total effective rate and adverse events of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Leveraging dynamics informed neural networks for predictive modeling of COVID-19 spread: a hybrid SEIRV-DNNs approach.

A dynamics informed neural networks (DINNs) incorporating the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered-vaccinated (SEIRV) model was developed to enhance the understanding of the temporal evolution dynamics of infectious diseases. This work integrates differential equations with deep neural networks to predict time-varying parameters in the SEIRV model. Experimental results based on reported data from China between January 1, and December 1, 2022, demonstrate that the proposed dynamics informed neural networks (DINNs) method can accurately learn the dynamics and predict future states.

Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher-student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model.

Retinal blood vessels are the only blood vessels in the human body that can be observed non-invasively. Changes in vessel morphology are closely associated with hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other systemic diseases, and computers can help doctors identify these changes by automatically segmenting blood vessels in fundus images. If we train a highly accurate segmentation model on one dataset (source domain) and apply it to another dataset (target domain) with a different data distribution, the segmentation accuracy will drop sharply, which is called the domain shift problem.

Biological characteristics, immune infiltration and drug prediction of PANoptosis related genes and possible regulatory mechanisms in inflammatory bowel disease.

PANoptosis is one of several modes of programmed cell death (PCD) and plays an important role in many inflammatory and immune diseases. The role of PANoptosis in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is currently unknown. Differentially expressed PANoptosis-related genes (DE-PRGs) were identified, and pathway enrichment analyses were performed.

Causality-driven candidate identification for reliable DNA methylation biomarker discovery.

Despite vast data support in DNA methylation (DNAm) biomarker discovery to facilitate health-care research, this field faces huge resource barriers due to preliminary unreliable candidates and the consequent compensations using expensive experiments. The underlying challenges lie in the confounding factors, especially measurement noise and individual characteristics. To achieve reliable identification of a candidate pool for DNAm biomarker discovery, we propose a Causality-driven Deep Regularization framework to reinforce correlations that are suggestive of causality with disease.

Visualizing stepwise evolution of carbon hybridization from sp to sp and to sp.

Regulating carbon hybridization states lies at the heart of engineering carbon materials with tailored properties but orchestrating the sequential transition across three states has remained elusive. Here, we visiualize stepwise evolution in carbon hybridizations from sp³ to sp² and to sp states via dehydrogenation and elimination reactions of methylcyano-functionalized molecules on surfaces. Utilizing scanning probing microscopy, we distinguish three distinct carbon-carbon bond types within polymers induced by annealing at elevated temperatures.

Two-layer homolog network approach for PFAS nontarget screening and retrospective data mining.

The rapid increase of novel per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) raises concerns, while their identification remains challenging. Here, we develop a two-layer homolog network approach for PFAS nontarget screening using mass spectrometry. The first layer constructs networks between homologs, with evaluation showing that it filters 94% of false candidates.