Radiomics model for distinguishing tuberculosis and lung cancer on computed tomography scans.

BACKGROUND: Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and lung cancer (LC) are common diseases with a high incidence and similar symptoms, which may be misdiagnosed by radiologists, thus delaying the best treatment opportunity for patients. AIM: To develop and validate radiomics methods for distinguishing pulmonary TB from LC based on computed tomography (CT) images. METHODS: We enrolled 478 patients (January 2012 to October 2018), who underwent preoperative CT screening. Radiomics features were extracted and selected from the CT data to establish a logistic regression model. A radiomics nomogram model was constructed, with the receiver operating characteristic, decision and calibration curves plotted to evaluate the discriminative performance. RESULTS: Radiomics features extracted from lesions with 4 mm radial dilation distances outside the lesion showed the best discriminative performance. The radiomics nomogram model exhibited good discrimination, with an area under the curve of 0.914 (sensitivity = 0.890, specificity = 0.796) in the training cohort, and 0.900 (sensitivity = 0.788, specificity = 0.907) in the validation cohort. The decision curve analysis revealed that the constructed nomogram had clinical usefulness. CONCLUSION: These proposed radiomic methods can be used as a noninvasive tool for differentiation of TB and LC based on preoperative CT data.

Expressions of thermostable bacterial cellulases in tobacco plant.

An economical method for the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass is to use plants as bioreactors for cellulases production. Two bacterial thermostable cellulases (E2 and E3) and a E3-E2 fusion form were expressed in tobacco, driven by a double 35S promoter and 5' TEV-UTL. The enzymes were targeted to the apoplast and cytosol via 5' signal peptides and 3' retention signal peptides, respectively, and all showed functional activities. All transgenic plants exhibited normal growth compared to wild type. Transgenic plants that expressed apoplast-localized E2 had the highest average activity, about 1.5 and 3 times higher than those expressed ER-localized and cytosolic E2, respectively. Effect of subcellular compartment localization was due primarily to post-transcriptional modification, since mRNA abundances were similar despite the range of cellulase activities obtained. The recombinant cellulases exhibited good thermostability below 65 °C. After storing for 3 days at -20 and 28 °C, the enzymes lost nearly 20 and 80% of activity, respectively. The results suggested a potential application for heterologous expression of cellulases in plant for biomass conversion.