Pembrolizumab combined with lenvatinib as non-first-line therapy in patients with refractory biliary tract carcinoma

Background:A therapeutic strategy involving combined treatment with lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab(LEP)has demonstrated a relatively high antitumor response in several solid tumors;however,the efficacy and safety of LEP in patients with refractory bile tract carcinoma(BTC)remains unknown.Methods:This is a single-arm study for a preliminary assessment of the efficacy and tolerability of LEP in patients who experienced progression from prior systemic treatments.Pre-treatment tumor tissues were collected to retrospectively evaluate the expression status of PDL1.Results:Thirty-two patients received second-line and above treatment with LEP.Overall,the objective response rate(ORR)was 25%,the disease control rate(DCR)was 78.1%,and the clinical benefit rate(CBR)was 40.5%.The median progression-free survival(PFS)was 4.9 months(95%CI:4.7–5.2 months),and the median overall survival(OS)was 11.0 months(95%CI:9.6–12.3 months).For tolerability,no grade 5 serious adverse events(AEs)were reported.All patients had any-grade AEs,and 59.3%of the patients experienced grade 3 AEs,while only 1 patient experienced a grade 4 AE of stomach bleeding.Fatigue was the most common AE,followed by hypertension and elevated aminotransferase levels.Retrospective analysis for PDL1 expression revealed that PDL1 positive tumor cells were associated with improved clinical benefits and survival outcomes.Conclusions:LEP is a promising alternative as a non-first-line therapeutic regimen for patients with refractory BTC.Furthermore,well-designed prospective clinical trials with a control arm are still needed to obtain more evidences to confirm the efficacy and safety of this particular regimen as well as the role of PDL1 expression.

Soft-tissue-segmentation methods during image-guided precision liver surgery

Introduction Image-guided liver surgery is the current direction in which‘precision surgery’is developing[1].Clinical doctors can extract the structural information of the liver and perform a geometric analysis of the liver shape using the liver-segmentation technique.This technique provides data for subsequent procedures,including measuring the volume,evaluating the function,locating the lesions and planning the surgery.Nonetheless,the structural extraction and segmentation of the liver are still mostly based on manual outlining of layers in liver CT images,which is subjective and inefficient.In recent years,many methods on automatic segmentation of the liver have been proposed and examined[2].