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Background: Transanal endoscopic microsurgery (TEM) is an established technique for the resection of rectal adenomas and selected malignant tumours. It avoids the morbidity of radical resection for tumours not amenable to endoscopic resection. An important marker of quality is the local recurrence rate. The primary objective was to determine local recurrence rates for benign and malignant rectal tumours. Methods: We identified index TEM excisions of rectal adenomas and adenocarcinomas in patients age 18 and over at Dunedin Hospital, New Zealand, between 2000 and 2020, from a prospective database. Surveillance data were collected via chart review. The primary outcome was recurrence rate for adenomas and adenocarcinomas. Secondary outcomes included time to recurrence, association of recurrence with recognized risk factors, and adverse event rates. Results: We identified 100 patients for analysis. Of 75 benign cases, 11 (14.7%) developed local recurrence, with 63.6% identified within 1 year. Of the 25 malignant cases (19 T1, 5 T2, 1 T3), 9 (36%) developed recurrence, with 77.8% identified within 2 years. Adverse events occurred in 26% of patients, with no reoperations or deaths. Conclusion: Our adenoma recurrence rate was at the higher end of the reported range of 2.4–16%. Minor complications were common, but not major morbidity. The propensity for rectal tumours to recur commonly and early reinforces the importance of regular standardized endoscopic surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the seventh edition of the publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), the APA style now prescribes bias‐free language and encourages accessibility even to non‐academic audiences. However, even with the newest guidelines, the way we credit authors in psychology remains anachronistic, intransparent, and prone to conflict. It still relies on a sequence‐determines‐credit approach in the byline, which concurrently is contradicted by the option to consider the last author as the position of the principal investigator depending on the field or journal. Scholars from various disciplines have argued that relying on such norms introduces a considerable amount of error when stakeholders rely on articles for career‐relevant decisions. Given the existing recommendations towards a credit‐based system, ignoring those issues will further promote bias that could be avoided with rather minor changes to the way we perceive authorship. In this article, we introduce a set of easy‐to‐implement changes to the manuscript layout that value contribution rather than position. Aimed at fostering transparency, accountability, and equality between authors, establishing those changes would likely benefit all stakeholders in contemporary psychological science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic constitutes a prolonged global crisis, but its effects on mental health seem inconsistent. This inconsistency highlights the importance of considering the differential impact of the pandemic on individuals. There is some evidence that mental health trajectories are heterogeneous and that both sociodemographic and personal characteristics are associated with higher risk for mental health issues. By contrast, information on the role of social factors as potential determinants of initial reactions to the pandemic and on heterogeneous trajectories over time is lacking. We analysed seven assessments of a large‐scale (N = 2203) longitudinal study across 1.5 years, beginning in March 2020. Using self‐report data on mental health and life satisfaction, we applied latent change models to examine initial reactions and mean changes across the pandemic. In addition, we applied latent class growth analyses to investigate whether there were distinct groups with different patterns of change. Results showed that on average, levels of life satisfaction and anxiety decreased (d = −0.31 and d = −0.11, respectively), levels of depressive symptoms increased (d = 0.13), and stress levels remained unchanged (d = −0.01) during the first year of the pandemic. For each outcome, we identified four distinct mental health trajectories. Between 5% (for anxiety) and 11% (for life satisfaction) of the sample reported consistently high—and even increasing—impairments in mental health and well‐being. The trajectories of a sizeable number of people covaried with the course of the pandemic, such that people experienced better mental health when the number of COVID cases was low and when fewer restrictions were placed on public life. Low emotional support, high instrumental support, and the tendency to compare oneself with others were associated with more mental health issues. Findings show that whereas a substantial portion of people were largely unaffected by the pandemic, some individuals experienced consistently high levels of psychological distress. Social factors appear to play a crucial role in the maintenance of well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Megavoltage (MV) X‐ray detectors used in cancer treatment either suffer from low sensitivity (scintillators) or prohibitively high cost (direct conversion). Here solution‐processed direct‐conversion MV X‐ray detectors are demonstrated based on halide perovskites. The authors' prototype devices show a sensitivity of ≈0.7 µC Gyair−1 cm–2, high photon‐to‐carrier conversion efficiency of 42 500%, and a signal‐to‐noise ratio of ≈1750 to 6 MV X‐ray beam of a medical linear accelerator. The detector shows a contrast of over −1.5% per cm of solid water, comparable to state‐of‐art commercial gadolinium oxysulfide (GOS) MV X‐ray scintillators. This work demonstrates the first prototype of low‐cost and efficient direct‐conversion MV X‐ray detectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 lockdowns represent a major life event with an immense impact on university students' lives. Findings prior to the pandemic suggest that changes in personality and subjective well‐being (SWB) can occur after critical life events or psychological interventions. The present study examined how university students' extraversion, neuroticism, and SWB changed during two COVID‐19 lockdowns in Germany. To this end, we conducted a partly preregistered, two‐cohort study with four measurement points each from October 2019 to May 2021 (NStudy 1 = 81–148, NStudy 2 = 82–97). We used both multilevel contrast analyses and multi‐group random‐intercept cross‐lagged panel models to examine within‐person changes over time. Levels of life satisfaction, extraversion, and, unexpectedly, neuroticism were lower during both lockdowns. Students' affect improved during the first but deteriorated during the second lockdown, suggesting that similar experiences with the deceleration of daily life were associated with different affective outcomes during the two lockdown periods. Following the introduction or termination of a lockdown, changes in extraversion (neuroticism) were consistently positively (negatively) associated with changes in SWB. Our results stress the importance of disentangling between‐ and within‐person processes and using pre‐COVID baseline levels to examine changes in personality and SWB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X‐ray detectors are used widely, but they suffer from short operational stability and insufficient absorptivity of X‐ray photons. Here, a strategy for room‐temperature, solution‐grown δ‐CsPbI3 monocrystalline microwires exhibiting one of the highest linear X‐ray absorption coefficients among known semiconductors is reported. In a metal–semiconductor–metal architecture, δ‐CsPbI3 demonstrates one of the lowest detectable X‐ray dose rates at 33.3 nGyair s−1, enabled by its exceptionally low dark current density of 12 pA mm−2. The detector remains stable following a continuous operation for a total accumulated dose of 1.44 × 106 Gyair, which is equivalent to 720 million chest X‐ray scans. The 1D crystalline nature of δ‐CsPbI3 enables a high X‐ray imaging resolution of 12.4 line pairs per millimeter (lp mm−1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To present an x‐ray tube system capable of in vitro ultrahigh dose‐rate (UHDR) irradiation of small < 0.3 mm samples and to characterize it by means of a plastic scintillation detector (PSD). Methods and materials: A conventional x‐ray tube was modified for the delivery of short UHDR irradiations. A beam shutter system with a sample holder was designed and installed in a close proximity of an x‐ray tube window to enable <1 s irradiations at UHDR. The dosimetry was performed with a small 0.5‐mm long 0.5‐mm in diameter PSD irradiated with 80, 100, and 120 kVp beams and beam currents of 1–37.5 mA. The PSD signal was recorded at frame rates of 20 and 50 fps for shutter exposure between 100 and 1125 ms. Irradiation reproducibility was studied with the PSD. The x‐ray tube irradiation setup was modeled with Monte Carlo (MC) and dose on a surface of a phantom was also measured with films. The effect of dose delivery uncertainty to 300‐μm spheroids due to positioning and spheroid size was evaluated. Results: MC simulations showed good agreement with PSD measurements acquired at both frame rates of 20 and 50 fps in terms of beam temporal profile. PSD‐measured dose exhibited excellent linearity as a function of instantaneous dose rate from 3.1 to 118.0 Gy/s as well as shutter exposure time from 100 and 1125 ms for all investigated beam energies. PSD absorbed dose for the 80, 100, and 120 kVp beams agreed with MC simulations to within 5%. The total delivered doses ranged from 0.4 Gy for a 1‐mA, 80 kVp beam, and 100 ms shutter exposure to 166.9 Gy for a 37.5‐mA, 80 kVp beam, and a 1125 ms exposure. PSD irradiation reproducibility was < 0.5%. Simulated and measured dose fall off agreed and it was steep along the axis of the shutter slit (1%/0.1 mm) and with depth (2%/0.1 mm at 1‐mm depth). Spheroid positioning uncertainty of 300 μm resulted in dose difference of < 3% for x and y shifts but up to 7% uncertainty for a z‐shift parallel to the beam axis. A 16% difference in spheroid size resulted in <5% dose difference in spheroid absorbed dose. Conclusions: We have presented a cost‐effective x‐ray tube‐based system with a beam shutter designed for in vitro UHDR delivery and reaching dose rates of up to 118.0 Gy/s. The described shutter system can be easily implemented at other institutions, which might enable new researchers to investigate the radiobiology of UHDR irradiations in vitro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EnTAP (Eukaryotic Non‐Model Transcriptome Annotation Pipeline) was designed to improve the accuracy, speed, and flexibility of functional gene annotation for de novo assembled transcriptomes in non‐model eukaryotes. This software package addresses the fragmentation and related assembly issues that result in inflated transcript estimates and poor annotation rates of protein‐coding transcripts. Following filters applied through assessment of true expression and frame selection, open‐source tools are leveraged to functionally annotate the reduced set of translated proteins. Downstream features include fast similarity search across five repositories, protein domain assignment, orthologous gene family assessment, and Gene Ontology (GO) term assignment. The final annotation integrates across multiple databases and selects an optimal assignment from a combination of weighted metrics describing similarity search score, taxonomic relationship, and informativeness. Researchers have the option to include additional filters to identify and remove contaminants, identify associated pathways, and prepare the transcripts for enrichment analysis. This fully featured pipeline is easy to install, configure, and runs significantly faster than comparable annotation packages. EnTAP is optimized to generate extensive functional information for the gene space of organisms with limited or poorly characterized genomic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]