TLD calibration and absorbed dose measurement in a radiation-induced liver injury model under a linear accelerator

The application of a thermoluminescent detector(TLD) for dose detection at the liver irradiation site in mice under linear accelerator precision radiotherapy and the use of a single high dose to irradiate the mouse liver to construct a biological model of a radiation-induced liver injury(RILD) in mice were to determine the feasibility of constructing a precision radiotherapy model in small animals under a linear accelerator. A 360° arc volumetric rotational intensity-modulated radiotherapy(VMAT) plan with a prescribed dose of 2 Gy was developed for the planned target volume(PTV) at the location of the TLD within solid water to compare the difference between the measured dose of TLD and the assessed parameters in the TPS system. The TLD was implanted in the livers of mice, and VMAT was planned based on TLD to compare the measured and prescribed doses. C57BL/6 J mice were randomly divided into control and 25-Gy radiation groups and were examined daily for changes in body weight. They were euthanized at 3 and 10 weeks after radiation, and the levels of liver serum enzymes such as alanine aminotransferase(ALT), aspartate aminotransferase(AST), and alkaline phosphatase(ALP) were measured to observe any pathological histological changes in the irradiated areas of the mouse liver. The measured values of solid underwater TLD were within ± 3% of the Dmean value of the evaluation parameter in the TPS system. The mice in the 25-Gy radiation group demonstrated pathological signs of radiation-induced liver injury at the site of liver irradiation. The deviation in the measured and prescribed doses of TLD in the mouse liver ranged from-1.5 to 6%;construction of an accurate model of RILD using the VMAT technique under a linear accelerator is feasible.

Non-coding RNAs:an emerging player in osteomyelitis

Osteomyelitis is a debilitating bone infection primarily caused by Staphylococcus aureus.Despite advancements in surgery and chemotherapy,the treatment of osteomyelitis remains unsatisfactory,characterized by antibiotic resistance and recurrent relapses.Numerous studies have confirmed that non-coding RNAs could play an emerging role in regulating gene expression,as well as in the differentiation of osteoblasts and osteoclasts,along with bone formation.In this context,we provide an overview of current knowledge regarding the roles of non-coding RNAs in osteomyelitis and explore the potential therapeutic applications of these molecules in disease management,aiming to uncover novel diagnostic and treatment approaches.

Research of caged dynamics of clusters center atoms in Pd_(82)Si_(18) amorphous alloy

To date,there is still a lack of a comprehensive explanation for caged dynamics which is regarded as one of the intricate dynamic behaviors in amorphous alloys.This study focuses on Pd_(82)Si_(18)as the research object to further elucidate the underlying mechanism of caged dynamics from multiple perspectives,including the cage's lifetime,atomic local environment,and atomic potential energy.The results reveal that Si atoms exhibit a pronounced cage effect due to the hindrance of Pd atoms,resulting in an anomalous peak in the non-Gaussian parameters.An in-depth investigation was conducted on the caged dynamics differences between fast and slow Si atoms.In comparison to fast Si atoms,slow Si atoms were surrounded by more Pd atoms and occupied lower potential energy states,resulting in smaller diffusion displacements for the slow Si atoms.Concurrently,slow Si atoms tend to be in the centers of smaller clusters with coordination numbers of 9 and 10.During the isothermal relaxation process,clusters with coordination numbers 9 and 10 have longer lifetimes,suggesting that the escape of slow Si atoms from their cages is more challenging.The findings mentioned above hold significant implications for understanding the caged dynamics.

Effect of a disposable endoscope precleaning kit in the cleaning procedure of gastrointestinal endoscope:A multi-center observational study

BACKGROUND Precleaning is a key step in endoscopic reprocessing.AIM To develop an effective and economic endoscope cleaning method by using a disposable endoscope bedside precleaning kit.METHODS Altogether,228 used gastrointestinal endoscopes were selected from five high-volume endoscopy units and precleaned by a traditional precleaning bucket(group T)or a disposable endoscope bedside precleaning kit(group D).Each group was further subdivided based on the replacement frequency of the cleaning solution,which was replaced every time in subgroups T1 and D1 and every several times in subgroups Ts and Ds.The adenosine triphosphate(ATP)level and residual proteins were measured three times:Before and after precleaning and after manual cleaning.RESULTS After precleaning,the precleaning kit significantly reduced the ATP levels(P=0.034)and has a more stable ATP clearance rate than the traditional precleaning bucket.The precleaning kit also saved a quarter of the cost of enzymatic detergent used during the precleaning process.After manual cleaning,the ATP levels were also significantly lower in the precleaning kit group than in the traditional precleaning bucket group(P<0.05).Meanwhile,the number of uses of the cleaning solution(up to four times)has no significant impact on the cleaning effect(P>0.05).CONCLUSION Considering its economic cost and cleaning effect,the use of a disposable endoscope bedside precleaning kit can be an optimal option in the precleaning stage with the cleaning solution being replaced several times in the manual cleaning stage.

化学镀钴和超级化学镀填充的研究进展(英文)

随着半导体集成度的不断提高,铜互连线的电阻率迅速提高。当互连线宽度接近7 nm时,铜互连线的电阻率与钴接近。IBM和美国半导体公司(ASE)已经使用金属钴取代铜作为下一代互连线材料。然而,钴种子层的形成和超级电镀钴填充7 nm微孔的技术工艺仍是一个很大的挑战。化学镀是在绝缘体表面形成金属种子层的一种非常简单的方法,通过超级化学镀填充方式,直径为几纳米的盲孔可以无空洞和无缝隙的方式完全填充。本文综述了化学镀钴的研究进展,并分析了还原剂种类对化学镀钴沉积速率和镀膜质量的影响。同时,在长期从事超级化学填充研究的基础上,作者提出了通过超级化学镀钴技术填充7 nm以及一下微盲孔的钴互连线工艺。

Risk factors for long-term prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma patients after anatomic hepatectomy

BACKGROUND The risk factors for patients with major postoperative complications immediately after liver resection have been identified;however,the intermediate and longterm prognoses for these patients have yet to be determined.AIM To evaluate the factors responsible for the long-term recurrence-free survival rate in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)following anatomic hepatectomy.METHODS We performed a retrospective analysis of 74 patients with HCC who underwent precise anatomic hepatectomy at our institution from January 2013 to December 2015.The observational endpoints for this study were the tumor recurrence or death of the HCC patients.The overall follow-up duration was three years.The recurrence-free survival curves were plotted by the Kaplan-Meier method and were analyzed by the log-rank test.The value of each variable for predicting prognosis was assessed via multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis.RESULTS The 1-year and 3-year recurrence-free survival rates of HCC patients were 68.92%and 55.41%,respectively,following anatomic liver resection.The results showed that the 3-year recurrence-free survival rate in HCC patients was closely related to preoperative cirrhosis,jaundice level,tumor stage,maximal tumor diameter,complications of diabetes mellitus,frequency of intraoperative hypotensive episodes,estimated blood loss(EBL),blood transfusion,fluid infusion,and postoperative infection(P<0.1).Based on multivariate analysis,preoperative cirrhosis,tumor stage,intraoperative hypotension,and EBL were identified to be predictors of 3-year recurrence-free survival in HCC patients undergoing anatomic hepatectomy(P<0.05).CONCLUSION Tumor stage and preoperative cirrhosis adversely affect the recurrence-free survival rate in HCC patients following anatomic hepatectomy.The long-term recurrence-free survival rate of patients with HCC is closely related to intraoperative hypotension and EBL.

Application of Minimum Effective Cuff Inflating Volume for Laryngeal Mask Airway and its Impact on Postoperative Pharyngeal Complications

Background：High intracuffpressure can cause severe pharyngeal complications including sore throat or hoarseness after laryngeal mask airway （LMA） removal postoperatively.Though the application of minimum effective cuffinflating volume is suggested to maintain airway sealing and adequacy of ventilation for patients receiving general anesthesia with LMA at lower level of the intracuffpressure,it is currently not a standard care in most of the anesthetic departments.In this study,the minimum effective cuff inflating volume was determined for classic LMA Well LeadTM （Well Lead Medical Co.,Ltd.,China） and its impact on postoperative pharyngeal complications was also explored.Methods：Patients with American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status （Ⅰ-Ⅲ） undergoing the short-duration urological surgery were recruited in this trial.First,the minimum effective cuff inflating volume was determined for size 4 or 5 LMA Well LeadTM in the study 1.Immediately following placement and confirmation of ideal LMA position,the cuff was inflated with 5,7,10 ml of air and up to 30 ml at 5 ml increment.The intracuff pressure,oropharyngeal leak pressure （OLP）,and inspiratory peak airway pressure under positive pressure ventilation at the corresponding cuff volume as indicated above were recorded.Second,the enrolled patients were randomly allocated into minimum effective cuff inflating volume group （MC） and routine care （RC） group in the study 2.The minimum effective cuff inflating volume was applied and maintained in MC group,whereas the cuff volume was inflated with half of the maximum cuff inflating volume recommended by manufacturer in RC group throughout the surgical procedure and stay in postanesthesia care unit prior to LMA removal.The incidence of pharyngeal complications at 0,2,24,and 48 h after removal of LMA and other intra-operative adverse events were also documented.Results：The intracuffpressure varied with the cuff inflating volume in a positive linear correlation manner （Y =11.68X-42.l,r2 =0.9191） under the range of 5-30 ml for size 4 LMA.In similar with size 4 LMA,the data were also showed the linear relationship between the intracuff pressure and the cuff inflating volume （Y =7.39X-10.9,r2 =0.8855） for size 5 LMA.The minimal effective cuff inflating volume for size 4 or 5 LMA was 7-9 ml in combination of considering OLP needed to maintain airway sealing during intermittently positive pressure ventilation.The intracuffpressure in MC group was lower compared with RC group （63.0 ± 3.7 vs.126.4 ± 24.0 cmH2O for size 4 LMA;55.6 ± 2.4 vs.138.5± 26.8 cmH2O for size 5 LMA;P ＜ 0.0001）.The incidence of pharyngeal adverse events was lower in MC group versus the RC group at 2,24 h after LMA removal.Conclusions：The relationship between the cuff inflating volume and the intracuffpressure for size 4 or 5 LMA Well LeadTM is in a linear correlation manner at the range of 5-30 ml.The minimal cuffinflating volume is adequate for satisfactory airway sealing and consequently associated with lower incidence of postoperative pharyngeal complications for LMA Well Lead.TM

Analysis of 1-year Consecutive Application with Focused Transthoracic Echocardiography in Noncardiac Surgery

Point-of-care transthoracic echocardiography （TTE） is an evolving field in anesthesia field and verified to have the potential to provide rapid diagnostic information during the hemodynamic collapse in operating room.[1] In this retrospective observatory study, we retrieved all the data of 1-year consecutive use of intraoperative echocardiography in patients with circulatory collapse or undergoing selective high-risk noncardiac surgery.

PCRTAM-Net:A Novel Pre-Activated Convolution Residual and Triple Attention Mechanism Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Retinal images play an essential role in the early diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases.Automatic segmentation of retinal vessels in color fundus images is challenging due to the morphological differences between the retinal vessels and the low-contrast background.At the same time,automated models struggle to capture representative and discriminative retinal vascular features.To fully utilize the structural information of the retinal blood vessels,we propose a novel deep learning network called Pre-Activated Convolution Residual and Triple Attention Mechanism Network(PCRTAM-Net).PCRTAM-Net uses the pre-activated dropout convolution residual method to improve the feature learning ability of the network.In addition,the residual atrous convolution spatial pyramid is integrated into both ends of the network encoder to extract multiscale information and improve blood vessel information flow.A triple attention mechanism is proposed to extract the structural information between vessel contexts and to learn long-range feature dependencies.We evaluate the proposed PCRTAM-Net on four publicly available datasets,DRIVE,CHASE_DB1,STARE,and HRF.Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance of 97.10%,97.70%,97.68%,and 97.14%for ACC and 83.05%,82.26%,84.64%,and 81.16%for F1,respectively.

Protective effect of icaritin on focal cerebral ischemic–reperfusion mice

Objective： To investigate the protective effects of icaritin （ICT）, one of the active ingredients in Epimedii Folium, on mouse model of cerebral ischemia-reperfusion （I/R） in vivo. Methods： ICR mice were subjected to an I h transient middle cerebral artery occlusion （MCAO） and fol- lowed by 24 h of reperfusion. Neurological deficits, infarct volume, brain edema and survive rate were measured, respectively. The levels of brain IL-1β, TNF-a, ROS and DNA-binding activity of NF-KB p65 were measured by ELISA kits. The levels of malondialdehyde （MDA） and activities of superoxide dismu- tase （SOD） were detected by spectrophotometry, and the release of nitric oxide （NO） were detected by Griess kit. Results： ICT markedly reduced the neurological deficit scores, brain edema, infarct volume and increased the survival rate of the cerebral I/R mice. The expression of IL-Iβ, TNF-α, NO, MDA and DNA-binding activity of NF-KB p65 were significantly inhibited by ICT, while the activity of SOD were up-regulated at the same time. Conclusion： ICT possessed significant neuroprotective effects in cerebral I/R mice, which might be related to prevent neuroinflammatory and oxidative damage.

Research on the knee region of cosmic ray by using a novel type of electron-neutron detector array

By accurately measuring composition and energy spectrum of cosmic ray,the origin problem of so called“knee”region(energy>one PeV)can be solved.However,up to the present,the results of the spectrum in the knee region obtained by several previous experiments have shown obvious differences,so they cannot give effective evidence for judging the theoretical models on the origin of the knee.Recently,the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory(LHAASO)has reported several major breakthroughs and important results in astro-particle physics field.Relying on its advantages of wide-sky survey,high altitude location and large area detector arrays,the research content of LHAASO experiment mainly includes ultra high-energy gamma-ray astronomy,measurement of cosmic ray spectra in the knee region,searching for dark matter and new phenomena of particle physics at higher energy.The electron and thermal neutron detector(EN-Detector)is a new scintillator detector which applies thermal neutron detection technology to measure cosmic ray extensive air shower(EAS).This technology is an extension of LHAASO.The EN-Detector Array(ENDA)can highly efficiently measure thermal neutrons generated by secondary hadrons so called“skeleton”of EAS.In this paper,we perform the optimization of ENDA configuration,and obtain expectations on the ENDA results,including thermal neutron distribution,trigger efficiency and capability of cosmic ray composition separation.The obtained real data results are consistent with those by the Monte Carlo simulation.