TSRNet: A Dual-Stream Network for Refining 3D Tooth Segmentation.

The field of 3D tooth segmentation has made considerable advances thanks to deep learning, but challenges remain with coarse segmentation boundaries and prediction errors. In this article, we introduce a novel learnable method to refine coarse results obtained from existing 3D tooth segmentation algorithms. The refinement framework features a dual-stream network called TSRNet (Tooth Segmentation Refinement Network) to rectify defective boundary and distance maps extracted from the coarse segmentation. The boundary map provides explicit boundary information, while the distance map provides gradient information in the form of the shortest geodesic distance between the vertex and the segmentation boundary. Following well-designed rules, the two refined maps are utilized to move the coarse tooth boundaries toward their correct positions through an iterative refinement process. The two-stage refinement method is validated on both 3D tooth and segmentation benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon the coarse results from baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Correlation between the incidence of inguinal hernia and risk factors after radical prostatic cancer surgery: a case control study.

OBJECTIVE: The incidence of recurrent hernia after radical resection of prostate cancer is high, so this article discusses the incidence and risk factors of inguinal hernia after radical resection of prostate cancer. METHODS: This case control study was conducted in The First People's Hospital of Huzhou clinical data of 251 cases underwent radical resection of prostate cancer in this hospital from March 2019 to May 2021 were retrospectively analyzed. According to the occurrence of inguinal hernia, the subjects were divided into study group and control group, and the clinical data of each group were statistically analyzed, Multivariate Logistic analysis was performed to find independent influencing factors for predicting the occurrence of inguinal hernia. The Kaplan-Meier survival curve was drawn according to the occurrence and time of inguinal hernia. RESULTS: The overall incidence of inguinal hernia after prostate cancer surgery was 14.7% (37/251), and the mean time was 8.58 ± 4.12 months. The average time of inguinal hernia in patients who received lymph node dissection was 7.61 ± 4.05 (month), and that in patients who did not receive lymph node dissection was 9.16 ± 4.15 (month), and there was no significant difference between them (P > 0.05). There were no statistically significant differences in the incidence of inguinal hernia with age, BMI, hypertension, diabetes, PSA, previous abdominal operations and operative approach (P > 0.05), but there were statistically significant differences with surgical method and pelvic lymph node dissection (P < 0.05). The incidence of pelvic lymph node dissection in the inguinal hernia group was 24.3% (14/57), which was significantly higher than that in the control group 11.8% (23/194). Logistic regression analysis showed that pelvic lymph node dissection was a risk factor for inguinal hernia after prostate cancer surgery (OR = 0.413, 95%Cl: 0.196-0.869, P = 0.02). Kaplan-Meier survival curve showed that the rate of inguinal hernia in the group receiving pelvic lymph node dissection was significantly higher than that in the control group (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Pelvic lymph node dissection is a risk factor for inguinal hernia after radical resection of prostate cancer.

[Application of a modified vascular blocking technique in intrafascial nerve-sparing laparoscopic radical prostatectomy].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical effect of a modified vascular blocking technique in intrafascial nerve-sparing laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (INLRP). METHODS: We retrospectively studied the clinical data on 13 cases of INLRP completed via a modified vascular blocking technique between July 2021 and August 2022. The patients ranged in age from 64 to 73 (68.8 ± 3.15) years, with elevated PSA of 4.71－16.12 (9.71 ± 3.50) µg/L preoperatively. Prostate cancer was confirmed in all the cases by ultrasound-guided perineal prostate needle biopsy, with Gleason 6 in 7 cases and Gleason 7 in 6 cases. MRI revealed no preoperative tumor breakthrough in the prostatic capsule or pelvic lymph node metastasis. All the patients received INLRP with a modified superficial suture dorsal vein complex (DVC) combined with lateral prostatic pedicle vascular blocking. RESULTS: Prostatic capsule rupture occurred in 1 case during the operation, with positive resection margin indicated by rapid intraoperative frozen biopsy, so the lateral fascia resection was modified. No positive resection margin was found in any of the cases in postoperative pathological examinations. Urinary continence was restored in 8 cases immediately after surgery and in the other 5 within 2 weeks after catheter removal. At 1 month after surgery, all the patients were medicated with low-dose tadalafil (5 mg qd), and IIEF-5 scores of >15 were achieved in 4 cases (31%) at 1 month and in another 8 (62%) at 3 months postoperatively. CONCLUSION: INLRP via modified vascular blocking showed the advantages of desirable intraoperative bleeding control and postoperative tumor control, restoration of urinary continence and relatively satisfactory recovery of erectile function. However, due to the small sample size, short follow-up time and lack of control, our findings need to be further verified by more clinical studies.

TeethGNN: Semantic 3D Teeth Segmentation With Graph Neural Networks.

In this paper, we present TeethGNN, a novel 3D tooth segmentation method based on graph neural networks (GNNs). Given a mesh-represented 3D dental model in non-euclidean domain, our method outputs accurate and fine-grained separation of each individual tooth robust to scanning noise, foreign matters (e.g., bubbles, dental accessories, etc.), and even severe malocclusion. Unlike previous CNN-based methods that bypass handling non-euclidean mesh data by reshaping hand-crafted geometric features into regular grids, we explore the non-uniform and irregular structure of mesh itself in its dual space and exploit graph neural networks for effective geometric feature learning. To address the crowded teeth issues and incomplete segmentation that commonly exist in previous methods, we design a two-branch network, one of which predicts a segmentation label for each facet while the other regresses each facet an offset away from its tooth centroid. Clustering are later conducted on offset-shifted locations, enabling both the separation of adjoining teeth and the adjustment of incompletely segmented teeth. Exploiting GNN for directly processing mesh data frees us from extracting hand-crafted feature, and largely speeds up the inference procedure. Extensive experiments have shown that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art results for teeth segmentation and outperforms previous methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Staple Food Preference and Obesity Phenotypes: The Regional Ethnic Cohort Study in Northwest China.

Staple food preference vary in populations, but evidence of its associations with obesity phenotypes are limited. Using baseline data (n = 105,840) of the Regional Ethnic Cohort Study in Northwest China, staple food preference was defined according to the intake frequency of rice and wheat. Overall and specifically abdominal fat accumulation were determined by excessive body fat percentage and waist circumference. Logistic regression and equal frequency substitution methods were used to evaluate the associations. We observed rice preference (consuming rice more frequently than wheat; 7.84% for men and 8.28% for women) was associated with a lower risk of excessive body fat (OR, 0.743; 95%CI, 0.669-0.826) and central obesity (OR, 0.886; 95%CI, 0.807-0.971) in men; and with lower risk of central obesity (OR, 0.898; 95%CI, 0.836-0.964) in women, compared with their wheat preference counterparties. Furthermore, similar but stronger inverse associations were observed in participants with normal body mass index. Wheat-to-rice (5 times/week) reallocations were associated with a 36.5% lower risk of normal-weight obesity in men and a 20.5% lower risk of normal-weight central obesity in women. Our data suggest that, compared with wheat, rice preference could be associated with lower odds ratios of certain obesity phenotypes in the Northwest Chinese population.

Expression and prognostic value of carbonic anhydrase IX (CA-IX) in bladder urothelial carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the expression intensity of carbonic anhydrase IX (CA-IX) in bladder urothelial carcinoma and its predictive value for the recurrence after transurethral resection of bladder tumor. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was made of 194 specimens who underwent transurethral resection of bladder tumors in our hospital from January 2014 to January 2016 and completed follow-up. The expression intensity of CA-IX and the clinical data of the patients were analyzed, and the subjects were divided into positive group and negative group according to the expression intensity of CA-IX. The age, gender, T stage, degree of differentiation, tumor number, tumor diameter, recurrence of each group was analyzed. Logistic univariate and multivariate analysis was used successively to find independent influencing factors for predicting the recurrence of bladder urothelial carcinoma after resection. The Kaplan-Meier survival curve was drawn according to the relationship between CA-IX expression intensity and postoperative recurrence. RESULTS: The positive expression rates of CA-IX in bladder urothelial carcinomas were 68.1% (132/194). The positive expression of CA-IX had no statistical significance with age, gender and tumor diameter (P > 0.05), while the positive expression of CA-IX had statistical significance with tumor T stage, tumor differentiation, tumor number and recurrence (P < 0.05); Logistic regression analysis showed that clinical T stage, tumor differentiation, tumor number, and CA-IX expression intensities were independent risk factors for predicting recurrence of bladder urothelial carcinoma after resection (P < 0.05); There were 59 cases of recurrence in the positive expression of CA-IX group, with a recurrence rate of 44.69% (59/132), and 17 cases of recurrence in the negative expression group, with a recurrence rate of 27.41% (17/62). The mean recurrence time of CA-IX positive group was 29.93 ± 9.86 (months), and the mean recurrence time of CA-IX negative group was 34.02 ± 12.44 (months). The Kaplan-Meier survival curve showed that the recurrence rate and recurrence time of patients with positive expression of CA-IX in bladder urothelial carcinomas were significantly higher than those of patients with negative expression of CA-IX. CONCLUSION: CA-IX is highly expressed in bladder urothelial carcinoma, is a good tumor marker, and can be used as a good indicator for predicting the recurrence of bladder urothelial carcinoma after transurethral resection of bladder tumor.

Preoperative hydronephrosis is a predictive factor of ureteral stenosis after flexible ureteroscopy: a propensity scores matching analysis.

OBJECTIVES: Ureteral stenosis is a serious complication of flexible ureteroscopy. How to predict the possibility of stricture before surgery is an important topic. This research retrospectively studied the influence of preoperative hydronephrosis on ureteral stenosis after flexible ureteroscopy, to explore whether the preoperative hydronephrosis could predict postoperative ureteral stenosis. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective study on patients who received flexible ureteroscopy in our hospital for upper ureteral calculi from January 2015 to June 2018. Patients were followed-up for 36 months after surgery, and intraoperative and postoperative complications were recorded. We divided patients into the mild hydronephrosis group and moderate to severe hydronephrosis group. Preoperative clinical baseline data of the patients were adjusted by propensity matching score analysis. Differences of intraoperative ureteral injury, operative time, postoperative ureteral stricture, and SFR one month after surgery was statistically analyzed. Kaplan-Meier's method and Log-rank test were used to compare the differences in the cumulative incidence of ureteral stenosis between the two groups. Cox regression was used to compare the hazard ratio of ureteral stenosis between the two groups. RESULTS: A total of 447 patients with 469 sides surgery were included, including 349 sides in the mild hydronephrosis group and 120 sides in the moderate to severe hydronephrosis group. Twenty-nine patients with 30 sides developed ureteral stenosis. Before and after propensity, the incidence of ureteral stricture matching analysis was 6.4% and 8%, respectively. There were statistical differences in ureteral stricture and injury, but the statistical differences in SFR and operation time were inconsistent. Kaplan-Meier showed a significant difference in the cumulative incidence of ureteral stenosis between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with moderate to severe hydronephrosis before surgery were more likely to have an intraoperative ureteral injury and postoperative ureteral stricture after FRUS. Preoperative hydronephrosis is an important predictor of ureteral stricture.

DeepSketchHair: Deep Sketch-Based 3D Hair Modeling.

We present DeepSketchHair, a deep learning based tool for modeling of 3D hair from 2D sketches. Given a 3D bust model as reference, our sketching system takes as input a user-drawn sketch (consisting of hair contour and a few strokes indicating the hair growing direction within a hair region), and automatically generates a 3D hair model, matching the input sketch. The key enablers of our system are three carefully designed neural networks, namely, S2ONet, which converts an input sketch to a dense 2D hair orientation field; O2VNet, which maps the 2D orientation field to a 3D vector field; and V2VNet, which updates the 3D vector field with respect to the new sketches, enabling hair editing with additional sketches in new views. All the three networks are trained with synthetic data generated from a 3D hairstyle database. We demonstrate the effectiveness and expressiveness of our tool using a variety of hairstyles and also compare our method with prior art.

Long-term outcome of spiral ileal neobladder with orthotopic ureteral reimplantation.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to analyze long-term complications, urodynamics, and quality of life (QoL) of patients after orthotopic ileal neobladder with orthotopic ureteral reimplantation to enrich clinical data and provide a basis for clinical use of this surgery. METHODS: Between January 2007 and January 2013, 72 consecutive patients who underwent spiral ileal neobladder following radical cystectomy were enrolled. The neobladder was created using a modified Camey-II technique. Complications were reviewed and staged according to Clavien-Dindo classification and evaluated in long-term follow-up. Urodynamics were performed, and QoL was assessed by the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy for Bladder Cancer (FACT-BL) instrument. RESULTS: The total follow-up time was 60 months, and the total survival rates at 3 and 5 years after surgery were 76.4% (55/72) and 65.3% (47/72), respectively. There were 34 (47.2%) early complications in 23 (31.9%) patients and 42 (58.3%) late complications in 35 (48.6%) patients. The total satisfactory control rates were 69.1% and 66.0% at 3 and 5 years after the surgery, respectively. Urodynamic studies were performed in some patients, and the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that pressure at maximum capacity, compliance, and post void residual urine had predictive value for mortality (P < 0.05). The total FACT-BL scores of patients at 1, 3, and 5 years postoperation were 125.0 ± 15.2, 127.0 ± 16.2, and 120.6 ± 13.5, respectively, and it decreased at 5 years postoperation (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Spiral ileal neobladder with orthotopic ureteral reimplantation offers satisfactory long-term results, and urodynamic monitoring might have prognostic value.