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International audience; The purpose of this work is to present a patient-specific (PS) modeling approach for simulating percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) endovascular treatment and assessing the balloon sizing influence on short-term outcomes in peripheral arteries, i.e. without stent implantation. Two 3D PS stenosed femoral artery models, one with a dominant calcified atherosclerosis while the other with a lipidic plaque, were generated from pre-operative computed tomography angiography images. Elastoplastic constitutive laws were implemented within the plaque and artery models. Implicit finite element method (FEM) was used to simulate the balloon inflation and deflation for different sizings. Besides vessel strains, results were mainly evaluated in terms of the elastic recoil ratio (ERR) and lumen gain ratio (LGR) attained immediately after PTA. Higher LGR values were shown within the stenosed region of the lipidic patient. Simulated results also showed a direct and quantified correlation between balloon sizing and LGR and ERR for both patients after PTA, with a more significant influence on the lumen gain. The max principal strain values in the outer arterial wall increased at higher balloon sizes during inflation as well, with higher rates of increase when the plaque was calcified. Results show that our model could serve in finding a compromise for each stenosis type: maximizing the achieved lumen gain after PTA, but at the same time without damaging the arterial tissue. The proposed methodology can serve as a step toward a clinical decision support system to improve angioplasty balloon sizing selection prior to the surgery.

Aim To investigate the expression of formyl peptide receptor 2 (FPR2) in maternal blood, umbilical blood, and placenta of patients with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), and to analyze the changes of other pro‐inflammatory cytokines in blood, including interleukin 33 (IL‐33), IL‐1β, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF‐α), and C‐reactive protein (CRP), so as to reveal the pathogenesis of GDM. Methods FPR2, IL‐33, IL‐1β, T TNF‐α, and CRP in maternal blood and umbilical cord blood of 50 pregnant women with GDM and 30 normal pregnant women were analyzed by ELISA method to explore the correlation between inflammatory factors and blood glucose. The expression of FPR2 in placental tissues was analyzed by PCR and immunohistochemistry. Results The expression of FPR2 in maternal blood of gestational diabetes patients was significantly higher than that of normal pregnant women, and other inflammatory factors IL‐33 and IL‐1β in maternal blood were also significantly increased. The expression of FPR2 in umbilical cord blood of gestational diabetes was higher than that of normal pregnant women, but the difference was not significant. Other inflammatory factors IL‐33, IL‐1β, and CRP in umbilical cord blood were also significantly increased. The expression of FPR2mRNA and protein in placental tissues of gestational diabetes was significantly higher than that of normal pregnant women. Conclusions The level of FPR2, IL‐33, and IL‐1β in maternal blood was related to the pathogenesis of GDM and these inflammatory factors could be used as special candidate direction of marks for the prevention, clinical treatment and drug design of GDM, laying a new theoretical foundation for the treatment of GDM.

Aim Cesarean scar pregnancy (CSP) is a rare occurrence of ectopic pregnancy. CSP incidence has increased significantly as a result of the increase in cesarean section rates. At present, there are no standard treatment guidelines for CSP; therefore, we report a minimally invasive treatment method for patients diagnosed with CSP. Methods This study included 15 women who were diagnosed with CSP. Ultrasound-guided suction curettage was performed on all patients. The Cook Cervical Ripening Balloon was used to tamponade and prevent hemorrhage during the procedure. In 12 patients, the balloon was placed immediately following ultrasound-guided suction curettage; in two patients, the balloon was placed when excessive bleeding occurred post-curettage; and in one patient, the balloon was placed after the gestational sac evacuated by itself, and then suction aspiration was performed on day 5, following the evacuation. Human chorionic gonadotropin levels were evaluated three days after the procedure. Results Placement and inflation of the Cook Cervical Ripening Balloon was well tolerated by all patients. The balloon tamponade effectively reduced or prevented vaginal bleeding in all patients, and none of the patients had an estimated blood loss higher than 1000 ml. Conclusions Ultrasound-guided suction curettage is effective in the treatment of CSP. The Cook Cervical Ripening Balloon is easy to place and inflate and successfully prevented bleeding or assisted in the management of bleeding complications. We recommend the Cook Cervical Ripening Balloon as an adjuvant method for ultrasound-guided suction curettage for the treatment of CSP.

A novel class of tetrahydroisoquinoline derivatives were designed and synthesized as antitumor agents and evaluated for their in vitro and in vivo biological activities. The antiproliferative activities of all the target compounds on HUVEC, MCF-7 and HT-29 were evaluated. Compared with Colchicine (1.04×10-2 μM), 17d and 17e exhibited outstanding activity on MCF-7 with IC50 values 0.26×10-2 μM and 0.89×10-3 μΜ in cell cytotoxicity assay. The tubulin polymerization assay demonstrated that 17d and 17e exhibited better inhibition rate. In the MCF-7-xenograft mouse model which were treated with 17d and 17e by intraperitoneal injection, the tumor weight was decreased at same rate with Tamoxifen, and relative tumor proliferation rates were 59.48 % and 41.33 %, while Tamoxifen was 45.08 % with a daily dose of 20 mg/kg, which were demonstrated potent in vivo efficacy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Summary This paper describes a selective mass scaling method which is designed for the analysis of wave propagation problems in nearly incompressible materials. The incompressibility of materials leads to a high value of the compressional wave speed, which makes the time step extremely small in explicit time integration method. The proposed selective mass scaling method selects the eigenfrequencies related to volumetric deformation modes to decrease them, while it keeps the shear eigenmodes unchanged. This makes the time step no longer limited by the compressional wave speed but by the shear wave speed. A significant reduction of CPU time is obtained with a good accuracy for transient problems in small strains on free or largely prestressed media. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this study, visco-hyperelastic Landau's model, which is widely used in acoustical physic field, is introduced into a finite element formulation. It is designed to model the nonlinear behaviour of finite amplitude shear waves in soft solids, typically, in biological tissues. This law is used in finite element models based on elastography, experiments reported in Jacob et al, the simulations results show a good agreement with the experimental study: It is observed in both that a plane shear wave generates only odd harmonics and a nonplane wave generates both odd and even harmonics in the spectral domain. In the second part, a parametric study is performed to analyse the influence of different factors on the generation of odd harmonics of plane wave. A quantitative relation is fitted between the odd harmonic amplitudes and the non-linear elastic parameter of Landau's model, which provides a practical guideline to identify the non-linearity of homogeneous tissues using elastography experiment.