Clinical relevance of increased serum preneoplastic antigen in hepatitis C-related hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND The prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)patients remains poor despite advances in treatment modalities and diagnosis.It is important to identify useful markers for the early detection of HCC in patients.Preneoplastic antigen(PNA),originally reported in a rat carcinogenesis model,is increased in the tissues and serum of HCC patients.AIM To determine the diagnostic value of PNA for discriminating HCC and to characterize PNA-positive HCC.METHODS Patients with hepatitis C virus(HCV)-related hepatic disorders were prospectively enrolled in this study,which included patients with hepatitis,with cirrhosis,and with HCC.A novel enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was developed to measure serum PNA concentrations in patients.RESULTS Serum PNA concentrations were measured in 89 controls and 141 patients with HCV infections(50 hepatitis,44 cirrhosis,and 47 HCC).Compared with control and non-HCC patients,PNA was increased in HCC.On receiver operating characteristic curve analysis,the sensitivity of PNA was similar to the HCC markers des-γ-carboxy-prothrombin(DCP)andα-fetoprotein(AFP),but the specificity of PNA was lower.There was no correlation between PNA and AFP and a significant but weak correlation between PNA and DCP in HCC patients.Importantly,the correlations with biochemical markers were completely different for PNA,AFP,and DCP;glutamyl transpeptidase was highly correlated with PNA,but not with AFP or DCP,and was significantly higher in PNA-high patients than in PNA-low patients with HCV-related HCC.CONCLUSION PNA may have the potential to diagnose a novel type of HCC in which glutamyl transpeptidase is positively expressed but AFP or DCP is weakly or negatively expressed.

Full-spin-wave-scaled stochastic micromagnetism for mesh-independent simulations of ferromagnetic resonance and reversal

In this paper,we address the problem that standard stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert(sLLG)simulations typically produce results that show unphysical mesh-size dependence.The root cause of this problem is that the effects of spin-wave fluctuations are ignored in sLLG.We propose to represent the effect of these fluctuations by a full-spin-wave-scaled stochastic LLG,or FUSSS LLG method.In FUSSS LLG,the intrinsic parameters of the sLLG simulations are first scaled by scaling factors that integrate out the spin-wave fluctuations up to the mesh size,and the sLLG simulation is then performed with these scaled parameters.We developed FUSSS LLG by studying the Ferromagnetic Resonance(FMR)in Nd_(2)Fe_(14)B cubes.The nominal scaling greatly reduced the mesh size dependence relative to sLLG.We then performed three tests and validations of our FUSSS LLG with this modified scaling.(1)We studied the same FMR but with magnetostatic fields included.(2)We simulated the total magnetization of the Nd_(2)Fe_(14)B cube.(3)We studied the effective,temperature-and sweeping rate-dependent coercive field of the cubes.In all three cases,we found that FUSSS LLG delivered essentially mesh-size-independent results,which tracked the theoretical expectations better than unscaled sLLG.Motivated by these successful validations,we propose that FUSSS LLG provides marked,qualitative progress towards accurate,high precision modeling of micromagnetics in hard,permanent magnets.