Establishment and validation of a predictive nomogram for severe pleural effusion in liver cancer patients after hepatectomy.

This study aims to develop and validate a predictive nomogram for severe postoperative pleural effusion (SPOPE) in patients undergoing hepatectomy for liver cancer. A total of 536 liver cancer patients who underwent hepatectomy at the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery I of the Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College from January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2022, were enrolled in a retrospective observational study and comprised the training dataset. Lasso regression and logistic regression analyses were employed to construct a predictive nomogram. The nomogram was internally validated using Bootstrapping and externally validated with a dataset of 203 patients who underwent liver cancer resection at the Department of General Surgery III of the same hospital from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2022. We evaluated the nomogram using the receiver operating characteristic curve, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis. Variables such as drinking history, postoperative serum albumin, postoperative total bilirubin, right hepatectomy, diaphragm incision, and intraoperative blood loss were observed to be associated with SPOPE. These factors were integrated into our nomogram. The C-index of the nomogram was 0.736 (95% CI: 0.692-0.781) in the training set and 0.916 (95% CI: 0.872-0.961) in the validation set. The nomogram was then evaluated using sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis. The nomogram demonstrates good discriminative ability, calibration, and clinical utility.

Changes in transcriptome regulations of a marine rotifer Brachionus plicatilis under methylmercury stress.

Mercury (Hg), a heavy metal pollutant worldwide, can be transformed into methylmercury (MeHg) by various aquatic microorganisms in water, thus accumulating along the aquatic food chain and posing a particular challenge to human health. Zooplankton plays a crucial role in aquatic ecosystems and serves as a major component of the food chain. To evaluate the effects of MeHg on the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis and reveal the underlying mechanism of these effects, we exposed B. plicatilis to MeHg by either direct immersion or by feeding with MeHg-poisoned Chlorella pyrenoidesa, respectively, and conducted a transcriptomic analysis. The results showed that B. plicatilis directly exposed to MeHg by immersion showed significant enrichment of the glutathione metabolism pathway for detoxification of MeHg. In addition, the exposure to MeHg by feeding induced a significant enrichment of lysosome and notch signaling pathways of rotifers, supporting the hypothesis that MeHg can induce autophagy dysfunction in cells and disturb the nervous system of rotifers. In two different routes of MeHg exposure, the pathway of cytochrome P450 in rotifers showed significant enrichment for resisting MeHg toxicity. Our results suggest further studies on the potential mechanism and biological responses of MeHg toxicity in other links of the aquatic food chain.

Metabolic pathways of methylmercury in rotifer Brachionus plicatilis.

Methylmercury (MeHg) readily accumulates in aquatic organisms while transferring and amplifying in the aquatic food chains. This study firstly explores the in vivo accumulation sites and metabolic regulation of MeHg in the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis by aggregation-induced emission fluorogen (AIEgen) and metabolomics. Fluorescent image analysis by AIEgen showed that MeHg in B. plicatilis mainly occured in the ciliary corona, esophagus, mastax, stomach and intestine in the direct absorption group. In the other group, where B. plicatilis were indirectly supplied with MeHg via food intake, the accumulation of MeHg in the rotifer occurred in the ciliary corona, various digestive organs, and the pedal gland. However, the MeHg accumulated in the rotifer is difficult to metabolize outside the body. Metabolomics analysis showed that the significant enrichment of ABC transporters was induced by the direct exposure of rotifers to dissolved MeHg. In contrast, exposure of rotifers to MeHg via food intake appeared to influence carbon, galactose, alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolisms. Besides, the disturbed biological pathways such as histidine metabolism, beta-alanine metabolism and pantothenate and CoA biosynthesis in rotifers may be associated with L-aspartic acid upregulation in the feeding group. The significant enrichment of ABC transporters and carbon metabolism in rotifers may be related to the accumulation of MeHg in the intestine of rotifers. In both pathways of MeHg exposure, the arginine biosynthesis and metabolism of rotifers were disturbed, which may support the hypothesis that rotifers produce more energy to resist MeHg toxicity. This study provides new insight into the accumulation and toxicity mechanisms of MeHg on marine invertebrates from the macro and micro perspectives.

Methylmercury bioaccumulation in water flea Daphnia carinata by AIEgen.

Mercury ion (Hg2+) is a toxic heavy metal ion and Hg2+ is convertible to methylmercury (MeHg) by many aquatic microorganisms, leading to bioaccumulation and biomagnification in aquatic organisms, which can interfere with brain development and function in humans. This study employs a newly developed AIEgen (Aggregation-induced emission fluorogen) to quantify and visualise the process of MeHg bioaccumulation in vivo on the species of water flea Daphnia carinata. Two approaches to MeHg absorption were taken, either by direct incubation in a MeHg solution or by indirect consumption of algae contaminated with MeHg. We analysed the relationship between the ratio of photoluminescence (PL) intensities (I585/I480) and MeHg concentration (CMeHg) and generated a master curve for determining MeHg concentration based on the measurement of PL intensities. Fluorescent image analysis showed the occurrence of MeHg in D. carinata to be mainly in the compound eyes, optic nerve and carapace. This study indicates that MeHg absorption can be quantified and visualised in the body of zooplankton, and the MeHg transfer to zooplankton is more likely through direct exposure than via indirect food intake. The accumulation of MeHg in the eye and the nervous system could be the cause of the high mortality of D. carinata exposed to MeHg in water.

Learning Layer-Skippable Inference Network.

The process of learning good representations for machine learning tasks can be very computationally expensive. Typically, we facilitate the same backbones learned on the training set to infer the labels of testing data. Interestingly, This learning and inference paradigm, however, is quite different from the typical inference scheme of human biological visual systems. Essentially, neuroscience studies have shown that the right hemisphere of the human brain predominantly makes a fast processing of low-frequency spatial signals, while the left hemisphere more focuses on analyzing high-frequency information in a slower way. And the low-pass analysis helps facilitate the high-pass analysis via a feedback form. Inspired by this biological vision mechanism, this paper explores the possibility of learning a layer-skippable inference network. Specifically, we propose a layer-skippable network that dynamically carries out coarse-tofine object categorization. Such a network has two branches to jointly deal with both coarse and fine-grained classification tasks. The layer-skipping mechanism is proposed to learn a gating network by generating dynamic inference graphs, and reducing the computational cost by detouring the inference path from some layers. This adaptive path inference strategy endows the network with better flexibility and larger capacity and makes the high-performance deep networks with dynamic structures. To efficiently train the gating network, a novel ranking-based loss function is presented. Furthermore, the learned representations are enhanced by the proposed top-down feedback facilitation and feature-wise affine transformation, individually. The former one employs features of a coarse branch to help the finegrained object recognition task, while the latter one encodes the selected path to enhance the final feature representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on several widely used coarse-to-fine object categorization benchmarks, and promising results are achieved by our proposed model. Quite surprisingly, our layer-skipping mechanism improves the network robustness to adversarial attacks. The codes and models are released on https://github.com/avalonstrel/DSN.

A novel technology: microfluidic devices for microbubble ultrasound contrast agent generation.

Microbubbles are used as ultrasound contrast agents, which enhance ultrasound imaging techniques. In addition, microbubbles currently show promise in disease therapeutics. Microfluidic devices have increased the ability to produce microbubbles with precise size, and high monodispersity compared to microbubbles created using traditional methods. This paper will review several variations in microfluidic device structures used to produce microbubbles as ultrasound contrast agents. Microfluidic device structures include T-junction, and axisymmetric and asymmetric flow-focusing. These devices have made it possible to produce microbubbles that can enter the vascular space; these microbubbles must be less than 10 µm in diameter and have high monodispersity. For different demands of microbubbles production rate, asymmetric flow-focusing devices were divided into individual and integrated devices. In addition, asymmetric flow-focusing devices can produce double layer and multilayer microbubbles loaded with drug or biological components. Details on the mechanisms of both bubble formation and device structures are provided. Finally, microfluidically produced microbubble acoustic responses, microbubble stability, and microbubble use in ultrasound imaging are discussed.